In his learned and stimulating article that helps frame the contributions to this roundtable while also outlining directions for future work in this area, Nile Green notes the striking fact that it has been nearly a hundred years since the last substantial English survey of the field was attempted. That was M. G. Zubaid Ahmad's “Contribution of India to Arabic Literature,” completed as a PhD dissertation under the supervision of the noted Orientalist Sir Thomas Arnold (d. 1930) at the School of Oriental Studies (as it was then known), University of London, in 1929. It was subsequently published with a preface by another distinguished Orientalist, Sir Hamilton Gibb (d. 1971), and retains some scholarly interest to this day.1 That interest lies not only in the descriptions of the many Arabic-language works it lists—going well beyond Carl Brockelmann's classic Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur in this respect—but also, in hindsight, in the assumptions that guide Ahmad's work. Ahmad believed there was little in the Arabic literature surveyed that showed any originality, partly because there was not much remaining to be said in fields like Qur'anic exegesis, the reported teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), or law by the time Indian scholars began engaging seriously with these subjects. It was also partly to do with an intellectual decline well underway by the time relevant areas of inquiry had reached India. The intellectual landscape remained unrelieved whether one looked at religious or secular literature, or even at writings in Persian for that matter: “… in spite of the abundance of Persian literature produced in India, nothing original is found in these contributions.”2

Nile Green 在他的博学而鼓舞人心的文章中帮助构建了对这个圆桌会议的贡献，同时也概述了该领域未来工作的方向，Nile Green 指出了一个惊人的事实，即自上次尝试对该领域进行实质性的英国调查以来已经将近一百年了. 那是 MG Zubaid Ahmad 的“印度对阿拉伯文学的贡献”，在著名的东方学家托马斯·阿诺德爵士（卒于 1930 年）的指导下完成的博士论文伦敦，1929 年。随后由另一位杰出的东方学家汉密尔顿·吉布爵士（Hamilton Gibb，卒于 1971 年）撰写序言出版，至今仍保持着一定的学术兴趣。1个这种兴趣不仅在于它列出的许多阿拉伯语作品的描述——远远超出了 Carl Brockelmann 的经典Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur在这方面——但事后看来，在指导艾哈迈德工作的假设中。艾哈迈德认为，在所调查的阿拉伯文学中，几乎没有任何原创性，部分原因是在古兰经注解、先知穆罕默德的教义（圣训）或印度时代的法律等领域没有太多可说的学者们开始认真研究这些主题。这也部分与相关领域的调查到达印度时正在发生的知识衰退有关。无论是宗教文学还是世俗文学，甚至是波斯语著作，知识界的景象都没有得到缓解：“……尽管印度生产了大量的波斯文学，但在这些贡献中找不到任何原创内容。” 2个