Oxford’s Arabic chair defaulted on teaching and discouraged classes

Evidence

The then Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford refused to teach individual students, claiming that he was only paid to teach classes and, since he discouraged those individual students who might have formed such classes, he never had to do any teaching. Burton’s efforts to teach himself were seriously impeded by his failure to realize that Arabic was written from right to left and it was only when he encountered de Sacy’s distinguished Spanish student Pascual de Gayangos in Oxford that this fundamental misapprehension was corrected. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 313

Categorization

• CANDY: The brilliant linguist who for a time didn’t know Arabic runs right to left, plus a professor who figures out how to never teach — great table talk.

Related

• Orientalist scholars often spoke Arabic too classically for ordinary Arabs (similarity 0.80)
• Learning Arabic so quickly got scholars accused of practicing magic (similarity 0.78)