Arthur Arberry was the next to be appointed to the Gibb Memorial Trust after Reuben Levy; at the first meeting of the Trustees after World War II, on 12 January 1946, ‘it was unanimously resolved that Dr Arberry, who during the emergency had been invited to act as a coopted trustee, be appointed a trustee of the memorial’. It is likely that this affiliation, which consolidated connections already made, further facilitated a change of course and his return to Cambridge the following year, where in 1947 he took up the offered Chair of the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic, vacated by Charles Storey's decision to retire, also as a Gibb Trustee. Arberry had no hesitation in moving from London, where he had been first Professor of Persian (on the retirement of Vladimir Minorsky in 1944) and then even more briefly Professor of Arabic (in 1946): ‘my dream of returning to Cambridge became reality […] This was the supreme, the most eagerly coveted honour, to be a successor of Wheelock and Ockley, Samuel Lee and Wright, Browne and Nicholson’. Inevitably, Arberry saw himself as next in line of the great sequence of Cambridge Professors of Arabic who had done so much to promote the field and particularly the study of Persian literature, and it can be said that he remained intellectually stuck in that mind- and time-frame throughout his career.

The foundations of this great post-war success were laid in the brilliant achievements of his early years. The facts of his career are well known, because he narrates them himself, with a befitting effort at modesty, in some detail, and they are naturally repeated in various later accounts. Arthur Arberry was born on 12 May 1905 in Portsmouth, into a modest family, the father a petty officer in the Royal Navy who later fought, as Arberry proudly relates, in the battle of Jutland. Both parents were keen readers of ‘good books’, and he was ambitious to succeed, winning a scholarship to Portsmouth Grammar School and then to Pembroke College, to read Classics, by which time, in 1924, he ‘had read everything worth reading in Latin and Greek’.