In the second of our ReConEx podcast conversations Niall Allsopp and David Parry speak to Paul Auchterlonie, one of our ReConEx project advisors on textual encounters between Exeter and the Islamic world. Paul read Arabic at Oxford and spent 40 years as a university librarian specialising in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, most recently as librarian in charge of Middle East Collections at the University of Exeter. He is also the author or editor of numerous books and articles in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and on encounters between Britain and the Islamic world. One recent publication of particular relevance to the ReConEx project is Encountering Islam: Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-Century Algiers and Mecca (Arabian Publishing, 2012), a study of the first known Englishman to visit Mecca that incorporates a critical edition of Pitts’s work A Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans.
(Intro music from Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude No. 17 in A-flat major (BWV 862), performed on the harpsichord by Kimiko Ishizaka. Reproduced from musopen.org under Creative Commons licence.)