William Montgomery Watt Quotes

1909–2006 Scotland

William Montgomery Watt (14 March 1909 – 24 October 2006) was a Scottish historian, Orientalist, Anglican priest, and academic. From 1964 to 1979, he was Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Edinburgh.

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Random William Montgomery Watt quote

3 quotes

I am not a Muslim in the usual sense, though I hope I am a “Muslim” as “one surrendered to God”; but I believe that embedded in the Qur’an and other expressions of the Islamic vision are vast stores of divine truth from which I and other occidentals have still much to learn.

In the early days of the Islamic empire the Christian inhabitants of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were probably better off as dhimmis under Muslim Arab rulers than they had been under Byzantine Greeks.

Islamic Political Thought: The Basic Concepts (1968)

Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William Montgomery Watt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.