Duncan Black MacDonald

Duncan Black MacDonald (1863-1943) was an American Orientalist, who was a "pioneer of Arabic and Islamic studies in the United States".

[2] He studied Semitic languages at Glasgow and then Berlin, before teaching at the Hartford Theological Seminary in the United States starting in 1893, founding the first school in the U.S. devoted to Christian missionary work among the Muslims of the Middle East.

MacDonald was the second Western scholar to investigate the manuscripts of the Nights, after Hermann Zotenberg, and he began to publish his results in 1908.

But he did successfully prove that the ‘Tunisian MSS’ which Maximilian Habicht claimed to find and use for his Breslau Nights edition was a fake.

The Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Theological Seminary is named after him.