Robert Irwin obituary

To readers of fiction Robert Irwin, who has died aged 77, was known as the author of a series of historical and fantastical novels, 10 in total, beginning with The Arabian Nightmare (1983). This book was already written in the late 1970s when its author, then in his early 30s, attended the writing course at Morley College in London. But it was at Morley that Irwin met Eric Lane, a fellow aspiring novelist, who would go on to found Dedalus Press and publish The Arabian Nightmare as one of Dedalus’s first three books.

The venture was not an immediate success. “There was great excitement when Hatchards in Piccadilly had sold a copy of The Arabian Nightmare,” Lane said, “but unfortunately it was later found out of position in the bookshop.” Persistence brought the book to the attention of reviewers, however, including Hilary Bailey of the Guardian, who called it “constantly entertaining”.

As Bailey noted, Irwin had taken “the story-within-a-story technique of the Arab storyteller a stage further, so that a tangle of dreams and imaginings becomes part of the narrative fabric”. The nightmare of the novel’s title is the worst affliction of all, involving “infinite pain” while sleeping, yet pain that is forgotten in the morning. The Arabian Nightmare was later republished by both Penguin and Dedalus, and has been translated into 20 languages.

Alongside Irwin’s novels over the years came a series of non-fiction works about the Middle East and Islam, such as his useful guide The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), The Alhambra (2004), Mamluks and Crusaders (2010) and Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (2018).

He served as Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and in 2023 he was awarded the Royal Asiatic Society’s Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to scholarship in the field of Asian studies.

The most controversial of Irwin’s works was his polemical study For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), published in the US as Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. There he took issue with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and its pervasive influence.

This was not exactly an attack on Said’s political views, with much of which Irwin agreed. “American coverage of the Middle East and especially of Palestinian matters has mostly been disgraceful – biased, ignorant, and abusive,” Irwin said in interview at the time of the book’s publication.

At issue instead was Said’s uncertain grasp of both history and historiography, his lumping together of western scholars of any nationality whatsoever, and his consequent argument that their work was implicated in the western imperialist project.

Although there had been many criticisms of Said before For Lust of Knowing, just as there had been many criticisms of orientalism as a dangerous idea before Said’s intervention, Irwin’s book shed new light on the actual human figures Said had in mind. It persuaded some readers to think again, and merely antagonised others. Irwin had acquired deep knowledge of the Middle East and the Islamic world through years of study and travel.

He was born in Guildford, Surrey, the son of Joseph, a psychiatrist who served as superintendent at Holloway Sanatorium, and his wife, Wilhelmina. After attending Epsom college, which he loathed, Irwin studied modern history at Merton College, Oxford, and then worked on a thesis about the Mamluks, under the supervision of Bernard Lewis, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

While the thesis remained incomplete, Irwin converted to Islam at this time and, as he recalled in Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties (2011), entered a Sufi order as an initiate, in the Algerian town of Mostaganem.

In London he tried LSD (“still legal when I did it,” he later observed), anarchism, theosophy and everything else that the 60s had to offer, on a quest towards “understanding the meaning of life”. In Mostaganem he experimented with asceticism with essentially the same end in mind. “To have spent my life muttering over my rosary in a monastery seems pointless,” he recollected of that period. “God does not need that and neither do I.”

If nothing else, these early experiences served as material for novels, by turn surreal and sensuous, that look back to this period: Satan Wants Me (1999), The Runes Have Been Cast (2021) and Tom’s Version (2023). These last two constitute two-thirds of a trilogy that Irwin was working on at the time of his death.

Experiences of a different kind inform The Limits of Vision (1986), his second novel. In 1972 Irwin had been appointed a lecturer in medieval history at the University of St Andrews, and became a part-time lecturer, at various institutions, five years later. Having married Helen Taylor, also in 1972, he was now a house husband with a young daughter to look after, while Helen pursued her career as a parliamentary official.

The Limits of Vision mixes fantasy with housework, as its (female) protagonist fends off Mucor, the demonic “principle of evil” that threatens to engulf the world in “dust, fermentation, dry rot, iron mould”, etc.

Irwin, taking the side of humour and art in his fiction, could also juggle, perform conjuring tricks and indulge in a serious love of shopping, showing a dandyish side in his passion for smart shoes. He loved roller-blading (“Roller-blading keeps me sane”) and acquired a considerable degree of proficiency.

Around his part of south London, he was known as the man on roller-blades; he kept a pencil in his pocket for writing on the move. On one occasion he accidentally disrupted a TV outside-broadcast interview with the rightwing historian David Irving by roller-blading through the background.

His love of books, meanwhile, led to the creation of a library that was, he confessed, more abundant than orderly. His study, as he told the Guardian in 2008, ran not only to an astrolabe, purchased in a Damascan souk, but a Qur’an stand “bought very cheap in an auction in Scotland in the 1970s”, a number of Venetian carnival masks, a brass celestial globe “bought in a street market in Mumbai” and an armillary sphere “which came from a church jumble sale”.

After a diagnosis of cancer in 2020, and despite his increasing difficulty with getting about without a stick, and eventually a wheelchair, Irwin continued to travel as much as he could, speaking abroad, writing and trying to avoid being drawn into mere punditry on the worsening situation in the Middle East, which he found “intensely depressing” (while holding out hope that “things will settle down – it’ll just take decades”).

He is survived by Helen, their daughter, Felicity, and two grandchildren.