Duncan Black MacDonald (1863-1943) was an American Orientalist, who was a "pioneer of Arabic and Islamic studies in the United States".[1] He was praised by Hamza Yusuf as a "great Islamic scholar".[2]

He studied Semitic languages at Glasgow and then Berlin, before teaching at the Hartford Theological Seminary in the United States starting in 1893, founding the first school in the U.S. devoted to Christian missionary work among the Muslims of the Middle East.

Letter by MacDonald to Snouck Hurgronje (1919)

His main scholarly interest was Muslim theology, which led him to the study of the One Thousand and One Nights, as he believed that the Nights stories reflected the Muslim popular piety.

MacDonald was the second Western scholar to investigate the manuscripts of the Nights, after Hermann Zotenberg, and he began to publish his results in 1908. The Arabic MSS of Ali Baba he discovered at the Bodleian Library was later found to be counterfeited. But he did successfully prove that the ‘Tunisian MSS’ which Maximilian Habicht claimed to find and use for his Breslau Nights edition was a fake. MacDonald planned to prepare a critical edition of the only extensively surviving medieval manuscript of the Nights, the three-volume Galland Manuscript. However, nothing came out of it, and this critical edition was produced by Muhsin Mahdi (with reference to MacDonald's notes) only in 1984.

MacDonald also did important work on Arab magic and superstition, and Muslim-Christian relations. The Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Theological Seminary is named after him.[3]

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Macdonald, Duncan Black (1863-1943), bu.edu. Retrieved 23 May 2023.
  2. ↑ Islam's Universal Values, muslimcentral.com. Retrieved 23 May 2023.
  3. ↑ C. Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst, Islamic Studies in U.S. Universities, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2009, p. 5.
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Duncan Black MacDonald

Further reading

  • Bijlefeld, W. A. . "A Century of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary." [In English]. Muslim World 83/2 (1993: 103-17.
  • Robert Irwin. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Allen Lane, 1994. Pages 52-58.
  • Robert Irwin. For Lust of Knowing. London: Allen Lane, 2006. Page 214.
  • David A Kerr, "Macdonald, Duncan Black", in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson, New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998, p. 421.
  • Jean-Jacques Waardenburg. L'Islam dans le Miroir de l'Occident. [in French] Paris: Mouton & Co, 1963. pp.132-135; section II, III.B.4; III.C.4.
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