When I was 18 the October or Yom Kippur war broke out (1973) and the subsequent gas crisis. I thought that the Arab world was going to become more important and that anyone who could learn Arabic would have a lot of opportunities. In the fall of 1974 I was in England and staying with a friend of mine who was at St. Edmund Hall, one of the Oxford colleges. I loved the atmosphere and applied to the College for a place. Arabic was a minority subject at Oxford, meaning that it had less applicants than mainstream subjects like history or English. I calculated that my chances of getting in to the Universisty were better if I applied to study Arabic. They were and I got a place at The Queen's College. The way that they taught Arabic at Oxford was very demanding and after my preliminary exams I switched to Islamic History with Arabic as a minor subject. That really worked out for me. The course studied was from the time of the Prophet (pbuh) until the fall of the Mamluk Kingdom in Egypt in 1517.

Here is a link to my post on the Jinn.

https://medium.com/@glenn-stewartm/the-jinn-and-causality-in-the-modern-middle-east-2cfa0b036f6a