British scholar of Middle East Studies (1905–1969)
Arthur John Arberry (12 May 1905, in Portsmouth – 2 October 1969, in Cambridge) FBA was a British scholar of Arabic literature, Persian studies, and Islamic studies. He was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge. His English translation of the Qur'an, The Koran Interpreted, is popular amongst academics worldwide.[1][2]
Academic career
Arberry served as Head of the Department of Classics at Cairo University in Egypt. He eventually returned home to become the Assistant Librarian at the Library of the India Office. During the Second World War he was a Postal Censor in Liverpool[citation needed] and was then seconded to the Ministry of Information, which was housed in the newly constructed Senate House of the University of London. Arberry held the Chair of Persian at the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS, University of London, in 1944–47. He subsequently became the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, his alma mater, from 1947 until his death in 1969. He is buried in Ascension Parish, Cambridge, together with his wife Sarina Simons Arberry (1900-1973). She was Romanian by birth; Arberry first met her in Cairo and they married at Cambridge in 1932.[3][4]
Arberry is also notable for introducing Rumi's works to the west through his selective translations and for translating the important anthology of medieval Andalusian Arabic poetry The Pennants of the Champions and the Standards of the Distinguished. His interpretation of Muhammad Iqbal's writings, edited by Badiozzaman Forouzanfar, is similarly distinguished.
Arberry also introduced to an English-speaking audience the work of Malta's national poet, Carmelo Psaila, popularly known as Dun Karm,[5] in the bilingual anthology Dun Karm, Poet of Malta.
