Reynold Alleyne Nicholson was born in Yorkshire in 1868. He was educated at Aberdeen and Cambridge Universities before becoming Professor of Persian at University College, London, from 1901-1902. He then became lecturer in Persian at the University of Cambridge from 1902 to 1926, and Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge from 1926 to 1933. He was a scholar in Islamic literature and Islamic mysticism. He he studied and translated major Sufi texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish to English. Nicholson wrote two influential books: Literary History of The Arabs (1907) and The Mystics of Islam (1914).