8vo. xvi, 348 pp., [1], Dutch text with some Arabic, contemporary buckram, lightly faded edges, title gilt on spine & front cover, biblio. index, ‘Stellingen List’ loose, 2 pencil annotations on one page, otherwise copy in very good condition, Publication of the De Goeje Foundation No. 5, E J. Brill, Leiden, first edition, 1919.

Synopsis

Cornelis van Arendonk (1881 – 1946) was a Dutch Orientalist and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He enrolled as a theology student at Utrecht University in 1899, where he increasingly came into contact with the study of Semitic languages, especially of Arabic. He went to Leiden in 1904, to study further Semitic languages, led by De Goeje, Oort, Eerdmans and Marquart. In 1907 he received lessons from Snouck Hurgronje in the Arabic language, but concentrated his studies on the history of Islam. He obtained his doctorate in 1919 on the dissertation: The Emergence of the Zaidi Imamate in Yemen, which included a chapter from the earliest history of the Shiite-sectarian movement of the Zaids, which laid the foundations of a religious-political society in the 9th century.