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Thomas W. Arnold
‐
Orientalist scholar and administrator
Other names
Sir T. W. Arnold
Thomas Walker Arnold
Place of birth
Place of death
London
About
Thomas Arnold was an orientalist scholar and administrator. From 1888 to 1898 Arnold taught philosophy at the Muhammad Anglo-Oriental College (MAO) in Aligarh. His contemporaries were Theodore Morison (chair of the report into scholarships for Indians to study technical subjects in the UK in 1913) and Theodore Beck, the Principal of MAO College.
In 1898 Arnold joined the Indian Educational Service and taught philosophy at Government College, Lahore, where he had a profound influence upon the poet-philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. Arnold returned to London in 1904. He worked as assistant librarian at the India Office and taught Arabic at University College, London.
In 1892 Arnold married the niece of Theodore Beck. Theodore Beck's sister, Emma Josephine Beck, was Honorary Secretary of the National Indian Association from 1905 to 1932. In 1910, when the NIA's offices were housed in 21 Cromwell Road, so were the offices of the Bureau of Information for Indian Students for which Arnold acted as educational advisor to Indian students (1909–12). Arnold was also involved in the formation of the India Society in 1910. In 1920 he retired from the India Office and was appointed as the first holder of the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental Studies (founded in 1917).
Festival of Empire, 1911
Emma Josephine Beck, Theodore Beck, Laurence Binyon, Mohammad Iqbal, Theodore Morison.
The Preaching of Islam (London: A. Constable & Co., 1896)
The Court Painters of the Grand Moghuls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921)
The Caliphate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924)
Painting in Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928)
Bihzad and his Paintings in the Zafar-namah ms (London: B. Quaritch, 1930)
(with Alfred Guillaume) The Legacy of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931)
Gibb, H. A. R., ‘Arnold, Sir Thomas Walker (1864–1930)’, rev. Christine Woodhead, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30457]
Correspondence, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Correspondence, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics, London
Correspondence and papers, School of Oriental and African Studies Archive, London
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
