Background
BECKINGHAM, Charles was born on February 18, 1914 in Houghton, Huntingdonshire Son of Arthur Beckingham and Alice Beckingham.
BECKINGHAM, Charles was born on February 18, 1914 in Houghton, Huntingdonshire Son of Arthur Beckingham and Alice Beckingham.
The Grammar School, Huntingdon and Queens’ College Cambridge.
Beckingham read English at Queens College in Cambridge. He worked for the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1936 until 1946, interrupted by military and naval Intelligence service during the World World War II from 1942 until 1946. During that time he added to the Admiralty Handbook of Western Arabia.
He joined Manchester University as lecturer in Islamic History in 1951 becoming a Professor of Islamic Studies in 1958.
In Cyprus he studied the history of the Turkish community. In 1965, Beckingham became a professor of Islamic studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), at London University and was head of the Department of the Near and Middle East from 1969 until 1972.
He retired in 1981 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983. He wrote on travel literature in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including the introduction to an Atlas of the Arab World and the Middle East (1960).
He finished Professor Sir Hamilton Gibb"s translation and annotation of The Travels of Ibn Battuta.
Married Margery Ansell in 1946 (died in 1966).