James Heyworth-Dunne


James Heyworth-Dunne was a British orientalist. He studied Arabic literature under Sir H. A. R. Gibb in London in 1932, and became senior reader in Arabic at SOAS, University of London from 1928-1948. Under Gibb's direction he published the edited Arabic texts from the Kitāb al-Awrāķ of Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā aṣ-Ṣūlī; Kitāb al-Awrāķ : section on contemporary poets : Akhbār al-Rāḍī wal-Muttaķī : Ash'ār Awlād al-Khulafā’ wa Akhbārum He associated with Ignatius Krachkovsky, who had written on aṣ-Ṣūlī. He later moved to the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. and then lived in Egypt, where he improved Egyptian vernacular. He was multilingual in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Urdu, collecting, editing and publishing many books about the Islamic world.

Papers, 1860-1949

The Heyworth-Dunne papers at the Michigan Islamic Manuscripts Collection in Ann Arbor, in addition to collections of Abdul Hamid, Tiflis, Yahuda, and McGregor, constitute the majority holdings of Islamic material held by the M.I.M.C. The university acquired his personal collection of almost exclusively Arabic texts in 1950.
The collection of his papers at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace- now the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, California- comprises six boxes of studies, notes, photostats, manuscripts, correspondence, etc., dealing with history, philosophy, literature, education and religion in Egypt, the Arab world and Turkey.

Works