Firmly Established in Early 20th-Century Orientalism: Alphonse Mingana Among His Fellow Scholars

Alphonse Mingana (around 1880–1937), a well-known scholar and manuscript collector who specialized in Syriac language and literature literature and early Islam, was born near Mosul and moved early in his career to Britain. Mainly because of rumors that he had forged some manuscripts, Mingana’s reputation is often referred to as questionable. In this paper I want to argue that during his own active life, Mingana was much more respected by his fellow scholars in his fields of scholarship than one would think from more recent discourse about him, even though it seems that this appreciation is somehow limited to his expertise with manuscripts and Oriental languages.