An Oxford Arabist is someone who studied Arabic at Oxford University. I have a B.A. and M.A. in Oriental Studies. My course was in Islamic History and Arabic. We studied classical literary Arabic and as a result when I graduated, I could read a medieval manuscript with some facility I could not read a newspaper. The Laudian Professor of Arabic resisted having any modern Arabic on the curriculum for ages on the grounds that anything written after the 11th century was "derivative." In our first year we asked one of the tutors why they didn't teach us to speak the language, and he said, "If you had wished to learn to speak the language, you should have gone to a trade school."

FRankly, I think that the purpose of the Oriental Institute at Oxford was to turn out people to go and work in the administration of the British Empire but by the 1970s no one had informed the 'Dons' at Oxford that the Empire no longer existed.

Working on an archaeological dig in the Sudan sounds like fun. What period were you working on?

I've been to Cairo a couple of times and loved it but never to the Sudan. I spent two years in Saudia and twenty five in Bahrain.