Biography

Nicholson was an oriental scholar, was born at Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1868. His interest in oriental languages was stimulated first by his grandfather, the biblical scholar John Nicholson, and then fostered in Cambridge by E. G. Browne, with whom he read Persian. Later he succeeded Browne first as lecturer in Persian (1902-26), then in 1926 as the Sir Thomas Adams professor of Arabic. From the first, Nicholson was strongly attracted to the literature of Sufism. For his fellowship thesis he studied the mystical odes of Rumi, the 'Divani Shamsi Tabriz'. Later a major project was a complete critical edition with translation and annotation of the 'Mathnawí' of Rumi. Nicholson's work on Sufism was considered the greatest single contribution made by a European scholar to the subject. Also, he had completed his 'Literary History of the Arabs' (1907), a personal appreciation of Arabic literature, which became a standard text, and a series of Arabic language readers. The collection consists of a series of notebooks Transferred from the Faculty of Oriental Studies in 1961

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