British writer and scholar
Margaret Smith (1884– 23 February, 1970) was a British orientalist specializing in comparative religion and Sufism.
Biography.
Margaret Smith was born in Southport, Lancashire to William Smith and Alice Ann Tullis, the sixth of seven daughters. Her family belonged to the Church of England, and Smith remained a religious Christian throughout her life. She obtained a teacher's diploma from Oxford in 1916 and taught in the Middle East until 1925. She obtained her doctorate from the University of London in 1928 where she studied with Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Thomas Walker Arnold and Louis Massignon. Smith's dissertation became her seminal work on the early female Sufi mystic Rabi'a, titled "Rabi‘a the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam," one of the first English language biographies of Rabi'a. Smith was the first orientalist to focus her research on women Sufis.
From 1930 to 1932, she served as a lecturer on Islamic mysticism at the School of Oriental Studies. She then served as a research fellow at Girton College and a senior research student at Manchester College from 1936 to 1938. During World War II, she worked for the Wartime Social Survey, translating and writing texts for broadcasting in the Middle East and teaching Arabic to military personnel.
Legacy.
Smith's work on female Sufis influenced the German orientalist Annemarie Schimmel, who referenced her in her work on gender and Sufism, "My Soul is a Woman". Smith succeeded in bringing attention to the overlooked role of women mystics in Islam, being referenced by future writers such as Schimmel and Sachiko Murata.
However, her work has been critiqued by modern scholars of Sufism. Atif Khalil and Shiraz Sheikh state that Smith saw Sufism as inauthentically Islamic and primarily derived from Christian mysticism.
Works.
In the 1970s four of Smith's works — by then hard to come by — were reprinted in Amsterdam, by Philo Press in arrangement with The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London.
Her work "Rabi'a the Mystic" was reprinted by Oneworld as "Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rabi'a and Other Women Mystics in Islam" in 2001"." Her book "Studies in Early Mysticism in the Near and Middle East" was also reprinted by Oneworld.
Her other works include:
References.
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