Michael Scott was born in Beirut prior to the landing of the US Marines there in 1958. His parents taught several generations of Arab, Armenian, Iranian and Afghan students at the American University of Beirut. (established in 1866 by Protestant American missionaries and for over a century the pre-eminent American liberal arts institution of higher education outside North America).

Thirty years later he married at the Protestant Near East School of Theology in Beirut, only to leave the city on the last flight out just before Beirut International Airport closed for some months, in the wake of US air strikes upon Libya in 1986; this was amidst the on-going hostage crisis and the continuing civil war strife that beset Lebanon since the outbreak of the so-called 'two years war' (that lasted 16 years), in 1975.

That year, he travelled to Berkeley on the other side of the globe to study Arabic literature at the University of California with the (late) Lebanese literary scholar Mounah Khoury and the (late ) Palestinian novelist, translator of Faulkner and Shakespeare, and art critic, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who died in exile from his native Bethlehem, in Basra, Iraq.

After a foray into graduate studies in the history of science in the classical Islamic realm at Harvard University, from 1981 until 2004 Scott worked in and with local community development and relief programs mainly in the Middle East and South Asia, with Oxfam UK and Ireland, the Arab Resource Collective, Ltd, the Middle East Council of Churches, Save the Children Fund UK, the UN Centre for Human Settlements, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the US Committee for Refugees and MercyCorps International, and in various consultative capacities. This work led him to repeated visits to the Middle East, including extended periods of residence in Yemen, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.

In 1997 whilst managing the UN Center for Human Settlement's Afghanistan Urban Rehabilitation Program, he was obliged by the Pakistani authorities to leave the country, possibly for his vocal stance in support of Afghan female employees of the UN, under pressure from the ascendent Taliban to remain at home and abandon work in the public domain.

In 2005 after a year in Jerusalem and Hebron directing a USAID-funded school construction project, he returned to his early enthusiasm for Arabic language and literature, introducing the study of Arabic to undergraduates at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, and undertaking freelance translations of contemporary Arabic political and news commentary and fiction. He is currently on the job market, but hopes to continue teaching Arabic at McDaniel as an adjunct, all things permitting.