Duncan Black MacDonald

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