Yasin Hamid Safadi (1934-2006)

摘要

Yasin Hamid Safadi, who died in London on 7 May 2006 aged 71, was for many years head of the Arabic section at the British Library, and was widely respected for his profound knowledge of classical Arabic literature and bibliography. He was also author of the one of the first books on Islamic calligraphy which appealed to both a scholarly and a general audience. Yasin Safadi was born in Damascus, Syria on 8 September 1934. He was educated at the Ibn Khaldun College in Damascus, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Damascus before moving to the UK in 1956. In 1963 he graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, with a first class honours degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies. Following graduation Yasin stayed on at SOAS and began working on a Ph.D. thesis on the Arabic writer Ibn Nubata al-Sa'di, but his doctoral studies were interrupted when he moved to Kuala Lumpur to take up a post as lecturer in Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Malaya. This was followed in 1965 by a lectureship in Islamic studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, until 1969 when he joined the British Museum as Research Assistant for Arabic in the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books (OMPB). He was soon promoted to Assistant Keeper, and with other staff in the British Museum Library he moved to the newly-formed British Library in 1973.