Learning Arabic so quickly got scholars accused of practicing magic

Evidence

In 1613 Erpenius was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages (1613–24). His inaugural oration on the sapientia (wisdom) of the Arabs was to be much plagiarized by later professors of Arabic. He had been so quick to learn Arabic that he was accused of using magic to do so (just like Postel before him). — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 178

Categorization

• CANDY: A light, tweetable oddity: seventeenth-century Europe accused fast Arabic learners of sorcery — twice, independently.

Related

• Erpenius used Turkish dictionaries to improve Arabic scholarship, though Europeans scorned Turkish itself (similarity 0.80)
• Oxford’s Arabic chair defaulted on teaching and discouraged classes (similarity 0.78)