A Belated Appreciation of Irfan Shahid, 1926-2016

Irfan Shahid

I  have learned, rather belatedly, of the passing of Prof. Irfan Shahid, Professor at Georgetown, former Associate Fellow of Dumbarton Oaks, and Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, who passed away on November 9 at the age of 90.

Professor Shahid was one of the readers of my doctoral dissertation.Though he was the definitive historian of Byzantine-Arab relations down to the Islamic conquests, he didn't actually teach history at Georgetown, where he was the Oman Professor of Arabic and Islamic Literature, teaching the Qur'an, Classical Arabic Literature, and the like in the Arabic department. I really only got to know him from his eager involvement in my doctoral committee.

Born as Irfan Kawar in Nazareth in 1926 to a Palestinian Greek Orthodox family, he read Classics at Oxford and then took his Ph.D. at Princeton in Arabic and Islamic studies. I never did know why he changed his name from Kawar to Shahid.

Although he was a prominent enough figure at Georgetown, I suspect he was really far more at home at Dumbarton Oaks, the Harvard-owned Byzantine studies library in Washington, where he did most of his life's work on Byzantium and the Arabs. He discussed his time there in an interview at Dumbarton Oaks in 2008. His publications included Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs; Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century; and Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, and numerous articles. I am uncertain if his final volume, on the seventh century and the Arab Conquests, might have been far enough along to someday appear. Unfortunately, all his volumes are priced beyond my or most people's reach.

Remembering Philip Hitti's Role in US Middle East Studies

Back in 2012, I did a post about the role of the late Philip K. Hitti (1886-1978) in founding Middle Eastern/Arab studies in the United States. Though his famous History of the Arabs and many other works have now been largely superseded, he remains the US pioneer in the field.

Now, here's a post about Hitti's contribution that actually includes interesting selections from an unpublished Hitti memoir.

Philip K. Hitti at Princeton

400 Years of Arabic Studies in the Netherlands Exhibit in Leiden

Here's something for those too mired down with chemical weapons attacks and other issues of the day:  an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden: Excellence and Dignity. 400 years of Arabic studies in the Netherlands.

May 2013 marked the 400th anniversary of the inaugural lecture by Leiden’s first professor of Arabic studies, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624): ‘On the Excellence and Dignity of Arabic’. In Leiden, Arabic studies are a deep-rooted local tradition that is well known all over the world. Scholars such as Scaliger, Erpenius, Golius, De Goeje, and Snouck Hurgronje have become world renowned.

Happy 400th, Leiden.

Philip K. Hitti, "History of the Arabs" at 75, and the Birth of Arab Studies in the US

Philip K. Hitti at Princeton

Philip Khuri Hitti (1886-1978) may not be a familiar name among younger students in the Arabic Studies field in the US today, but once, he virtually was the Arabic Studies field in the US. This year marks 75 years since the publication in 1937 of the first edition of  History of the Arabs, which he started writing a decade earlier. That book, still in print in its 10th edition (revised), was for many years (including when I started out in the field 40 years back), not just the history of the Arabs but virtually the only one-volume history of the Arabs that took the story from the beginnings to the present in anything like a comprehensive manner. Today there are many, of which Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples perhaps replaces Hitti's work most effectively.  Today, re-reading Hitti, it strikes one as rather old-fashioned, a lot of it a narrative of names and dates, but it is still a useful compendium of the basic narrative. Hourani is better written and more modern and nuanced in its sensibilities. (Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A History is impressive but only begins with the Ottoman conquests, and so is limited in scope. I omit multi-volume and multi-author histories here.)

Hitti

A Maronite from Shimlan, Lebanon, born under Ottoman rule, Hitti, trained at AUB and Columbia, came to Princeton in 1926 as a Professor of Semitic Languages, at a time when "Oriental Studies" was mostly linguistic and literary. But most of his writing was to be history.

Hitti wrote many other books, on Lebanon, Syria, and much else; for a long time he was the only Middle Eastern scholar writing in the US in English on Middle Eastern history (though he was soon joined by Aziz Atiya and other pioneers). He was a man of his times; some of his books on Lebanon dwell a bit awkwardly on trying to interpret the "racial" characteristics of Maronites, Druze, and others. (A friend, himself a distinguished historian today, once privately told me Hitti spent too much time "measuring noses.") But that is a product of his era. Hitti was a founding father.  Without him, and without History of the Arabs, the whole Arab Studies field would look quite different today. Medicine has outgrown Galen, and mathematics has outgrown Euclid; so in the light of today's Arabic Studies literature, Hitti's work seems old-fashioned, stuffy, and incomplete. But if we see farther today, as the cliche goes, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants, and in the US Arab Studies community, the man at the bottom of that inverted pyramid is Philip Hitti.

I am told that there is, or was, a Lebanese cedar growing at Princeton, where Hitti taught for decades, because he had brought it over from Lebanon. Cedars can live a thousand years; may it do so. Seventy-five years since History of The Arabs first appeared and nearly 35 years after his death, we still owe much to Hitti, who brought much more than that cedar to this country.