Alfred Felix Landon Beeston, FBA (23 February 1911 – 29 September 1995) was an English Orientalist best known for his studies of Arabic language and literature, and of ancient Yemeni inscriptions, as well as the history of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Beeston was born at Barnes in southwest London, and educated at Westminster School where he was a King's Scholar.
At age 14 he grew fascinated with South Arabian inscriptions at the British Museum, which he attempted to decipher by means of an appendix in James Theodore Bent's Sacred City of the Ethiopians, asking for a Koran and Arabic dictionary as school prizes.
In 1929 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, already determined to become a librarian in oriental studies; in 1933 he got a first in Arabic and Persian.
Other major works include his contribution to the catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindustani and Pushtu manuscripts in the Bodleian, his studies of the Arabic language, namely The Arabic Language Today (1970) and Written Arabic: An Approach to Basic Structures (1968), and editions and translations of classical texts including al-Baidawi's Commentary on Sura 12 of the Qur'an (1963) and The Singing Girls of al-Jahiz (1980).