The position of Laudian Professor of Arabic, now known as the Abdulaziz Saud AlBabtain Laudian Professor, at the University of Oxford was established in 1636 by William Laud, who at the time was Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Archbishop of Canterbury. The first professor was Edward Pococke, who was working as a chaplain in Aleppo in what is now Syria when Laud asked him to return to Oxford to take up the position. Laud's regulations for the professorship required lectures on Arabic grammar and literature to be delivered weekly during university vacations and Lent. He also provided that the professor's lectures were to be attended by all medical students and Bachelors of Arts at the university, although this seems not to have happened since Pococke had few students, despite the provision for non-attenders to be fined. In 1881, a university statute repealed Laud's regulations and provided that the professor was to lecture in "the Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldee Languages", and attached the professorship to a fellowship at St John's College. In 2016, a large re-endowment from Kuwaiti philanthropist Abdulaziz Saud Al Babtain occasioned a change of the chair's name.
The standard of the professors has varied. The second professor, Thomas Hyde, is described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a "mediocre orientalist",[1] and one history of the university says of the third professor, John Wallis, that "not only did [he] give no lectures for most of his long tenure, but he did nothing to advance knowledge either."[2] Pococke, Joseph White, Sir Hamilton Gibb, and Alfred Beeston have received high praise for their scholarship.
David Margoliouth (professor 1889–1937) taught the syllabus for the final examinations in lectures over two years, forcing some students to tackle the more difficult texts in their first year of study. Successive professors had few students until after the Second World War, when numbers increased because of the reputation of the then professor, Gibb, and because some British students became interested in Arabic culture while serving in the Middle East during the war. Julia Bray, the first woman to hold the position, was appointed in 2012. The current Laudian Professor, Tahera Qutbuddin, was appointed in 2023 and is the first non-European and first Muslim person to hold the position.