Although he was not a prophet, false or otherwise, St Matthew's remark ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’ seems rather appropriate to apply to Reuben Levy. Arriving in Cambridge not long after Levy's death, I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but rather quickly and inevitably became familiar with his work, particularly two books: The Social Structure of Islam and his edition (and for an undergraduate, even more important translation) of the Nasihat-nama known as the Qabus-nama, of Kai Ka’us b. Iskandar. The Persian text of the Qabus-nama was published in the Gibb Memorial Series, NS XVIII, in 1951, and A Mirror for Princes the same year, by the Cresset Press, London. These were far from his only fruits, as we shall see.

Levy was born in Manchester on 28 April 1891, son of Harris Levy, a draper, and educated at the Friars School and the University College of North Wales, in Bangor, where he graduated in 1912. He then transferred to Jesus College, Oxford, as was relatively common at that time, and was awarded a Meyrick Graduate Scholarship to read Oriental Languages for a second, two-year degree. He gained a second in his Finals in 1914, when he specialised in Arabic and Hebrew. Levy clearly attracted attention in Oxford, as he hoovered up quite a few scholarships along the way: he was the Pusey and Ellerton Scholar in 1913, the Junior Kennicott Scholar in 1914 and later the James Mew Rabbinical Hebrew Scholar in 1915, as well as Senior Kennicott Scholar in 1923 when he returned after the war.

During the First World War, he was a captain in General Staff Intelligence in Mesopotamia (1916 to 1918) and worked in the Iraq Political Service (1918 to 1920). This gave Levy a chance to use and develop his knowledge of the languages he had studied, but more than that, to gain a close and sympathetic personal acquaintance with the society and cultures of the Middle East, about which he later wrote most effectively. He returned to Jesus College and lectured in Persian language at Oxford from 1920 to 1923, where he produced his first two books, Persian Literature: An Introduction, reprinted several times and most recently in 2012, as a classic reprint by an outfit disappointingly called Forgotten Books.