Россия и Арабский мир: к 200-летию профессора Санкт-Петербургского университета Шейха ат-Тантави (1810–1861)

41 Kaj Öhrnberg (Helsinki, Finland) The Professor and his pupil: Mu╩ammad ‘Ayyād al-╥an█āwī and Georg August Wallin The aim of this paper is to highlight the teacher – pupil relationship be- tween the Egyptian Professor of Arabic in St Petersburg Mu ╩ ammad ‘Ayyād al- ╥ an █ āwī (1810-1861) and the Finnish Arabist and explorer of the Arabian Peninsula Georg August Wallin (1811-1852). Russia acquired Finland from Sweden in the war of 1808-09. This opened Russia to the Finns and several Finns pursued Oriental studies in the main seats of Oriental scholarship in Russia: St Petersburg, Moscow and Ka- zan. Wallin had begun his studies of Oriental and Classical languages at the University of Helsinki in 1829. Between 1840 and 1842 he continued his studies of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish at both the University and the Insti- tute of Oriental Languages of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St Peters- burg. His teachers were Mu ╩ ammad ‘Ayyād al- ╥ an █ āwī in Arabic, Mīrzā Ismā‘īl in Persian, and Anton Muchlinski in Turkish. In 1841 Wallin was awarded a travel grant from the University of Helsinki to further his studies of Arabic dialects and to peruse himself with the doctrines of the nineteenth- century fundamentalists, the Wahhabis, who then dominated the form of Is- lam practised on the Arabian Peninsula. The travel grant was all the more surprising as the interest of Finnish academic circles, inspired as it was by romanticism and an awakening national spirit, was almost exclusively fo- cused on Siberia. Wallin tried to persuade al- ╥ an █ āwī to travel with him to Egypt but without success. However, the last person to see Wallin off on the quay in Helsinki in July 1843 was al- ╥ an █ āwī who had travelled to Finland together with P.I. de Maison, the director of the library at the Institute of Oriental Languages of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg. Wallin arrived in Cairo in January 1844. Henceforth he presented him- self as Abd al-Wali, a Muslim and Russian subject from Bukhara in Central Asia. Using Cairo as his base he made three journeys into the desert, journeys upon which his enduring reputation as a linguist and explorer is founded. Also in Cairo he met several fellow-students and colleagues from both St Petersburg and Kazan, who were sent on official missions by the Russian government. These included among others Ilja Nikolajevitsh Berjozin, Wilhelm F. Dittel and Timofejev. This was a "period in the history of Rus- sian Orientalism when needs of scholarly Orientalism were totally sacrificed to the real or alleged interests of the national life", as the great Russian Orien- talist V.V. Barthold has noted. Wallin returned to Helsinki in June 1850. To qualify for the chair of