Hellmut Ritter
German orientalist (1892–1971)
Hellmut Ritter (27 February 1892 – 19 May 1971) was a leading German Orientalist specializing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and an authority on Sufi ritual and mystical beliefs.
Biography
The son of a Protestant minister, his brothers were the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter and the theologist Karl Bernhard Ritter. He was educated at Halle where he studied under Carl Brockelmann and Paul Kahle, then at Strasbourg under Carl Heinrich Becker. He then served as a military interpreter during World War I in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. In 1919 he became a teaching assistant at the University of Hamburg, researching classical Arabic literature and Greek and medieval alchemy. But his academic career in Germany was effectively ended in 1925 when he was convicted for homosexuality. Being dismissed from his post in early 1926, he went to Istanbul.
Istanbul (1926-1949)
In Istanbul Ritter realised the city's ancient libraries held a wealth of manuscripts and literary treasures that lay moldering and unregarded. He began work on a series of scholarly articles, which he had published in the series Philologika; Issue I - Gustav Flügel's 1870 unfinished translation work on the tenth century encyclopedia of Ibn al-Nadim, entitled Al-Fihrist; Issue VII - edited translations of Arabic and Persian treatises on profane and mystical love; Issue VIII - Anṣāri Haravi and Sanāʾi Ḡaznavi; Issue X - Farid-al-din ʿAṭṭār; Issue XI - Jalāl-al-Din Rumi; Issues XIV-XVI - ʿAṭṭār.
He also discovered the original text of the fantasy anthology Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hellmut Ritter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.