Philip Khuri Hitti

Extract

Students of Middle East Studies in this country will, for generations to come, continue to sing the praises of the dean of American Arabists and Islamicists, who passed away last Christmas Eve. For there is hardly a scholar of the Middle East in this country whose academic career or intellectual development has not been directly or indirectly influenced by him, his students, or his many publications. There is hardly a center of Middle East studies in this country that has not followed the tradition for these studies which he established at Princeton University. In a real sense he was the father of these studies in America. Small wonder that his students and colleagues—following the medieval Islamic tradition in designating the head of an intellectual school—lovingly called him “al-Shaykh.”