Introduction

Speakers of Arabic have been teaching their language to people from other cultures for perhaps two millennia; this much we can surmise from examples of traders, diplomats, and scholars throughout late antiquity and the medieval period. Perhaps there were peaks and troughs, for instance in the period of heightened contact in al-Andalus and the wider Iberian Peninsula during the Islamic presence there. But it seems safe to say that the nineteenth century witnessed both an increase in demand for Arabic tuition and an institutionalization of the learning of Middle Eastern languages. This arose firstly from the greater density of contacts between peoples centring on the Mediterranean as steamships and railways enabled faster and cheaper travel. Secondly, it emerged from European imperial expansion – famously beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 – and the intertwined dynamics of trade, missionizing, and scholarship of more or less nefarious intent.