Philip K. Hitti - History of The Arabs

HISTORY OF THE ARABS

OF

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES

TO THE PRESENT

PHILIP K. HITTI

FORMERLY

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF SEMITIC LITERATURE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

REVISED TENTH EDITION

N EW P REFACE BY W ALID K HALIDI

Philip K. Hitti 1937, 1940, 1943, 1949, 1951, 1956, 1960, 1963, 1967, 1970
Preface to the revised tenth edition Walid Khalidi 2002

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First edition 1937
Second edition 1940
Third edition 1943
Fourth edition 1949
Fifth edition 1951
Sixth edition 1956
Seventh edition 1960
Eighth edition 1963
Ninth edition 1967
Revised tenth edition 2002

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This reissue of the tenth (1970) edition of Philip K. Hittis monumental History of the Arabs will be welcomed by all his many admirers and by teachers and students of the Arab and Muslim worlds wherever they may be.

The republication of this great work in the second year of the twenty-first century is also supremely timely for the general English-speaking public in Europe and the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war Western interest has increasingly focused on Islam. Facile theories of the so-called Clash of Civilizations have abounded. Fundamentalism, in all world religions is on the rise. Muslim minorities and others of Arab origin have grown in number in many European countries and in North America. Western dependence on oil in Arab and Muslim countries continues for the foreseeable future. Regional conflicts in Muslim or Arab countries have brought about in recent years massive Western military intervention in Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Despite peace treaties between Israel and both Jordan and Egypt and the internationally sponsored Madrid peace conference of 1991, the PalestinianIsraeli conflict rages unabated in the Holy Land.

The horrendous events of 11 September in New York and Washington have unleashed a USled global war against terrorism rightly or wrongly seen by many to have an essentially Muslim or Arab cultural provenance. Concurrently the level of understanding by the general Western public of Arab and Muslim history and civilization remains at a dismally inadequate level. This is manifested on an almost daily basis in the output of the audiovisual media and is often reflected in the glib generalizations of even leading Western pundits and senior officials. In short, never before has there been a greater need in the Western world and particularly in the United States its paramount leader for an authoritative and scholarly work on the Arab and Muslim peoples to tell the story as it is without passion or partisanship. Of all the many works that I know, I can think of no one other than Philip K. Hittis History of the Arabs to fulfil this imperative educational purpose.

It was Mr Daniel Macmillan who, in 1927, first commissioned Hitti to write his History. The author laboured for ten years to accomplish the task. Already in 1937 the first edition was a tour de force of scholarship, the fruit of years of teaching and study at Columbia University, the American University of Beirt and Princeton University. Since 1937 nine editions have appeared, the last in 1970. During this period the History was translated into many languages including Arabic, Spanish, Urdu, Italian, SerboCroat and Polish.

Each edition elicited tens of review articles by leading experts in their countries of origin. Corrections, suggestions and criticisms came from colleagues and research assistants working under the author. The work was further enriched by ongoing class discussions with generations of students, since it formed the basis of the authors own university course offerings. Simultaneously he kept a watchful eye on new publications in various languages on topics touched upon in his History as well as on the latest edited versions of medieval Arabic texts. Meanwhile the author travelled at least once a year, visiting or revisiting at one time or another every Arab country covered in his work and discussing its contents with countless Arab scholars, teachers and students. The History was thus essentially a work in progress for more than four decades, incorporating the rich harvest of all this accumulated input a unique depository of facts and insights about the Arabs and Islam.

A History of the Arabs lays down in some 700 pages a solid infrastructure of knowledge altogether indispensable for understanding developments that followed. It spans more than a millennium of history from preIslamic times pagan, Judaic Christian (the Arabs were Christians before they were Muslim) until the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the Arab world in the early sixteenth century. Five of the six parts, which constitute the bulk (more than 90 per cent) of the History cover this period. Part VI is a birdseye view, in broad brush strokes in some 50 pages, of developments political, social and cultural in the Arab world from the Ottoman conquest until the time of publication in 1970. Remarkable and enlightening as Part VI is, the core of the History is parts I to V.

In these principal components of the History the story is told of the origins of the Arabs, the emergence of Muammad the Arabian Prophet and the rise of Islam, and the early Righteous Caliphate. The History then traces the breathtaking spread of Islam within decades of its foundation across North Africa, into the Iberian Peninsula, across the Pyrenees and up to Poitiers in France in the West, to Byzantine Anatolia in the North and to Western China in the East.