MUIR, SIR WILLIAM (1819–1905), Scottish Orientalist, brother of the preceding, was born at Glasgow on the 27th of April 1819. He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy, at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and at Haileybury College, and in 1837 entered the Bengal Civil Service. He served as secretary to the governor of the North-West Provinces, and as a member of the Agra revenue board, and during the Mutiny he was in charge of the intelligence department there. In 1865 he was made foreign secretary to the Indian Government. In 1867 he was knighted (K.C.S.I.), and in 1868 he became lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces. In 1874 he was appointed financial member of the Council, and retired in 1876, when he became a member of the Council of India in London. He had always taken an interest in educational matters, and it was chiefly through his exertions that the central college at Allahabad, known as Muir's College, was built and endowed. In 1885 he was elected principal of Edinburgh University in succession to Sir Alexander Grant, and held the post till 1903, when he retired. Sir William Muir was a profound Arabic scholar, and made a careful study of the history of the time of Mahomet and the early caliphate. His chief books are a Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira; Annals of the Early Caliphate; The Caliphate, an abridgment and continuation of the Annals, which brings the record down to the fall of the caliphate on the onset of the Mongols; The Koran: its Composition and Teaching; and The Mohammedan Controversy, a reprint of five essays published at intervals between 1885 and 1887. In 1881 he delivered the Rede lecture at Cambridge on The Early Caliphate and Rise of Islam. He married in 1840 Elizabeth Huntly Wemyss (d. 1897), and had five sons and six daughters; four of his sons served in India, and one of them, Colonel A. N. Muir (d. 1899), was acting resident in Nepal.
MUḲADDASI[1] [the appellation of Shams ad Din Abu Abdallah Mahommed ibn Aḥmad] (fl. 967–985), Arabian traveller, author of a Description of the Lands of Islam which is the most original and among the most important of Arabic geographies of the middle ages. His family name was Al Bashari. His paternal grandfather was an architect who constructed many public works in Palestine, especially at Acre, and his mother's family was opulent. His maternal grandfather, a man of artistic and literary tastes, migrated to Jerusalem from Jurjan province in Persia, near the frontier of Khorasan. His descriptions rest on extensive travels through a long series of years. His first pilgrimage was made at the age of twenty (in A.H. 356＝A.D. 967), but his book was not published till A.H. 375 (A.D. 985–986), when he was forty years old.
The two MSS. (at Berlin and Constantinople) represent a later recension (A.H. 378). The book became known in Europe through the copy brought from India by Sprenger, and was edited by Professor M. J. de Goeje as the third part of his Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (Leiden, 1877). See also the English translation (unfinished) by G. S. A. Ranking and R. F. Azoo, in Bibliotheca Indica, New Series, Nos. 899, 952, 1001 (Bengal Asiatic Society, 1897–1901); Muķaddasi’s Syrian chapter has been separately translated and edited in English by Guy le Strange (London, Palestine Pilgrims Text Society, 1886); in German by J. Gildemeister in Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, vol. vii. (1884).
MUKDEN (Chinese Shêngking), the capital of Manchuria, on the Hun-ho, 110 m. N.E. of Niuchwang, in 41° 51′ N., 123° 38′ E., with a population of 250,000. It is a centre for trade and also for missionary enterprise. It was formerly the headquarters of the Manchu dynasty, and their tombs lie within its confines. Mukden is a fine town, with splendid walls, about a mile long each way. The suburbs extend a considerable distance from the city and are surrounded by mud walls. In the centre of the town stands a small palace surrounded by an inner wall and roofed with yellow tiles. The boots and pack of Nurhachu, the founder of the present Chinese dynasty, who was a pedlar, are preserved there. Nurhachu's son, the emperor T’ien-tsung (1627–1636), built temples to heaven and earth in the neighbourhood of the city in imitation of those at Peking. These are much dilapidated. Four or five miles to the east of the town stands the Fu-ling or “happy tomb,” where the remains of Nurhachu rest, the outer gates of which are adorned with a green majolica representation of an imperial dragon. The Emperor K'ien lung (1726–1796) wrote a poem on Mukden, which was translated into French by Pere Amiot and attracted the attention of Voltaire. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 some of the heaviest fighting took place before Mukden, what is known as the “battle of Mukden” covering operations from the 19th of February till the Japanese occupied Mukden on the 10th of March and the Russians retreated northward on the 12th.
MUKDISHU (Magodoxo), a seaport of Italian Somaliland, East Africa, in 2° 1′ N., 45° 24′ E. It is built on the sandy coast which separates the Webi Shebeli from the sea. The harbour is open. Mukdishu, formerly extensive, is largely in ruins; it consists of two villages, Hamarhwin to the south and Shingani to the north. There are some houses in the Moorish style and a mosque among the ruins bears date 636 A.H. (i.e. A.D. 1238). Between the two settlements is the governor's palace and north of the town is a massive square tower built by the Portuguese in the 16th century. The population, about 5000, is mainly composed of descendants of negro slaves known as Abesh. There are also Somali, Arab and Hindu settlers. Mukdishu is mentioned by Marco Polo and described by Ibn Batuta as an “immense” city. This was in the early part of the 14th century. It was a flourishing port and had many fine mosques when captured by the Portuguese (about 1510). Under Portugal the place fell into decay. It passed in the 17th century into the possession of the imams of Muscat, but in the 18th century became practically independent. It was reconquered by Seyyid Said c. 1830, and on the division of his dominions fell to Zanzibar. In 1892 it was transferred to Italy (see Somaliland, Italian). The name of the town is spelt in a great variety of ways, including Madeigascar, whence the name of the island of Madagascar. Alfred Grandidier points out that the Portuguese, misled by Marco Polo's description of Mukdishu as an island, fancied they had discovered the land of which he wrote when they touched at Madagascar.
MULA, a town of eastern Spain, in the province of Murcia; on the left bank of the Mula, a small right-hand tributary of the Segura, periodically liable to destructive floods. Pop. (1900), 12,731. The Sierra Espuña rises on the south to a height of nearly 5200 ft. Mula has a small trade in agricultural produce, wine and olive oil. About 4 m. east are two groups of houses known as the Baños de Mula, with warm sulphurous springs of considerable local repute.
MULATTO (Span, and Port, mulato, diminutive of mulo, Lat. mulus, a mule, used as denoting a hybrid origin), a person one of whose parents is of a white race and the other a negro. In Latin America such half-breeds are sometimes called mestizos.
MULBERRY[2] (botanically Morus; nat. ord. Moraceae), a genus of about ten species growing in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere and in the mountains of the tropics. They are deciduous trees or shrubs with alternate, toothed, often three-lobed leaves and unisexual flowers in catkin-like inflorescences.
The black mulberry (Morus nigra), a native of western Asia, spread westwards in cultivation at an early period; it was cultivated by the Greeks and Romans, and in northern Europe by the 9th and 10th centuries. Up to the 15th century it was extensively grown in Italy for rearing silkworms, but has since been superseded by M. alba. It is now mainly cultivated for its oblong purplish-black compound fruit—the so-called sorosis, formed from the whole female inflorescence in which the perianth leaves of the single flowers have become fleshy—which is wholesome and palatable if eaten fresh before acetous fermentation has set in. The mulberry succeeds as a standard in the warmer parts of England, especially in sheltered situations, but in the north of England and the less favoured parts of Scotland it requires the assistance of a wall. The standard trees require no other pruning or training than an occasional thinning out of the branches, and are generally planted on lawns, to prevent the fruit being damaged when it
