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Copyright By Yehonathan Brodski 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Yehonathan Brodski Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Sheikh of Princeton: Philip Hitti and the Tides of History APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Yoav Di-Capua, Supervisor Seth W. Garfield Madeline Y. Hsu Fred M. Donner John T. Karam The Sheikh of Princeton: Philip Hitti and the Tides of History by Yehonathan Brodski, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Abstract The Sheikh of Princeton: Philip Hitti and the Tides of History Yehonathan Brodski, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Yoav Di-Capua When Princeton University launched an Oriental Department in 1927, the school broke convention in two ways. Firstly, it sought to focus on Arabic and Islamic Studies, making the department the first center in the world devoted to these subjects. Secondly, the scholar chosen as the intellectual architect of the department was Philip Hitti (1886-1978), a native of the “Orient.” Less than a dozen Orient-born faculty had secured professorships in Western universities. None enjoyed institutional support as would Hitti. Born in Lebanon to Christian-Maronite parents, neither of whom enjoyed formal education, Hitti was the first native Arabic-speaker to earn a PhD in a university in the West (Columbia 1915). Before joining Princeton, iv Hitti headed New York's Cosmopolitan Club (1915-1920), the largest organization for foreign college and university students in the country. Princeton’s hiring of Hitti meant that a native Arabic-speaker would take the lead in developing Arabic and Islamic Studies in Western academia. Hitti subsequently became the most widely-circulating Orientalist of his time—as well as the most circulating Arabic writer until around 1960. Only Hitti’s compatriot and correspondent, Lebanon-born and immigrant-to- America Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883- 1931), supplanted Hitti in book-sales in the 1960s, thanks to Gibran's 1923 The Prophet. At Princeton, Hitti welcomed Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ambassadors, US Senators, a Shah and an Emperor, as well as ministers of education from around the world. Capital and technology from the Americas regularly flowed through Hitti to the Middle East. Hitti headed the 1915- founded Near East Foundation, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars for relief efforts in the Levant beginning in WWI. Hitti also exported the Arabic linotype printing press from the US internationally (1929), energizing an already fermenting Arabic printing revolution. Yet what happened to the memory of Philip Hitti? v This dissertation illuminates why Hitti has been forgotten-- and why he should be remembered. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Trangressions 1 Chapter 2: Origins 98 Chapter 3: Changing Lands 116 Chapter 4: Nahda 181 Chapter 5: ‘Orientalist Renaissance’ 244 Works Cited 295 vii Chapter 1: Transgressions “Of all the lands comparable to Arabia in size, and of all the peoples approaching the Arabs in historical interest and importance, no country and no nationality have perhaps received so little consideration and study in modern times, as have Arabia and the Arabs.” So began Philip K. Hitti’s History of the Arabs (1937), the standard textbook of Arab history, read throughout the world, for over half a century.1 Hitti’s History was “nothing short of revolutionary,” wrote Professor Fred Donner, chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, in a short 1996 article about the Princeton professor published in the Journal of Middle East Medievalists. Hitti’s work valorized the Arabs, treating them as a people worthy of attention from the Western academy. As significantly, the book popularized Arab history for a worldwide readership. “No other work of Middle Eastern Studies had an impact remotely as great,” Donner noted.2 In the Middle East, History underwent at least two separate unauthorized translations in the 1940s alone.3 Translated into twenty-five languages—including Urdu, Serbio-Croatian, Africaans, Persian and Bangali—History has since been reissued fourteen times in English and at least four in Arabic.4 Warned by his own publishers in 1 Hitti, Philip, History of the Arabs, 10th edition, 1970, pg 3. 2Donner, Fred, “Pioneers in Medieval Middle Eastern Studies, Al-'Usur al-Wusta, The Bulletin of Middle East Medievalists, October, 1996, pgs 48-53 3 Ta’rikh al-‘Arab, [unauthorized] tr. [of History of the Arabs] Muhammad Mabruk Nafi’, 3 vols. Manshurat Dar al- Mu’allimin al-Aliyah, no. 2. Baghdad: Matba’at Tafayyud and Matba’at al-Najah Ta’rikh al-‘Arab [unauthorized] tr. [of History of the Arabs] Muhammad Mabruk Nafi, 2nd printing, 3 vols. Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi w’al-Tiba’ah w-al-Nashr 4 Translation of 25 languages is stated in the TV show with Hitti circa 1955, Box 33 on CDs at IHRC. English editions: 1 1937 that he would not sell more than a hundred copies, Hitti proved the experts wrong, earning within months of initial publication praise from the world’s leading print publications, from The New York Times, to The Times of India, and the Irish Times.5 “[I]f any one book could be adduced in [establishing Arab Civilization],” noted the literary journal The London Mercury in July 1937, “it is the wholly admirable compilation of Professor Hitti, a thorough and indeed a renowned master of his subject.”6 The Christian Science Monitor called History “one of the finest histories ever devoted to a people and its accomplishments,”7 and reviewers in the Middle East concurred: “It is comprehensive and authoritative, and it is singularly free from that numbing aridity of style and presentation which is the orientalist’s worst drawback,” stated the English-language Egyptian Garzette of Alexandria, a few weeks following History’s publication, continuing: Hitti has been able to infuse no little charm into the scientific precision of his account. Unlike most of his brethren, he is not under the delusion that the mark of scholarship in Semitic affairs is to pack your prose as thick with polysyllables as currants in a cake. His object seems rather to have been to reach as many readers as possible by the clarity and quiet enthusiasm of his writing. The attractiveness of this method is…immaculate.8 History was a museum of over two thousand years of Arab history within the covers of a book. The widely available, scholarly blueprint of the collective past of Arabic-speakers 1937, 1940, 1943, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1964, 1970, 2002, 2007 (audiobook) Arabic editions: 1946, 1954, 1965, 1986, 5 For 100 copies, see Starkey, John, “A Talk with Philip Hitti,” July/August 1971, Volume 22, Number 4, http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197104/a.talk.with.philip.hitti.htm For The New York Times, see The New York Times Book Review, july 11, 1937 “The People of Arabia” By HI Katibah, Box 16, FF2 For Times of India, see Aug 27th 1937, “Pageant of Arab Civilization” Box 16, FF1 For Irish Times, see 3 July 1937, “Arabia Unveiled,” Box 16, FF 2 6 Box 16, FF 2, July 1937, “The Arab Civilization” by Kenneth Williams 7Box 15, FF 11, April 8, 1952, “From the Bookshelf” 8 August 7, 1937, The Egyptian Gazette, “Arabian Theme” Box 16, FF2 2 came in language that was not only easy to follow, but entertaining. 9 Hitti’s History of the Arabs “is the best survey of Arab history… in any modern language,” wrote Walter Wright from Turkey, President of Robert College in Istanbul.10 History of the Arabs was the first blockbuster of Arab history. By the release of the second edition in 1940, over fifty thousand English-language copies had sold, and that was in the US alone.11 Returning from Cairo, an American correspondent for Princeton’s alumni newspaper revealed in 1968 that History can “[still] be seen in every bookstore window in the Near East.”12 History valorized native Arabic-speakers of all religious origins and cultural practices, subverting the patronizing image of the Arabs that had hitherto dominated in academia. Offering an engaging text about a people generally neglected and often stigmatized in scholarship, History presented a “refutation of what had been, until that time, the prevailing conceptual paradigm... His work thus helped clear obstacles of ignorance and prejudice,” as Donner stressed. Emanating from Princeton, Arab history had never been so successful.13 In the nationalist congresses sprouting in Cairo and Damascus in the 1950s, Hitti’s History became a standard reference, the indispensable historical Bible of the broader regional past. Delegates debated the nature of Arab nationalism while carrying Hitti’s History of the Arabs in hand, a book which was “not only a significant work of 9Box 16, FF1, the Quarterly Review, March 1938, second from same box FF 2 10 Princeton Alumni Weekly on August 20, 1937, Box 16, FF1, 11 Box 14, FF 12, paper beginning with “Philip K. Hitti was born in Lebanon” 12Aminta W. Marks, “Princeton and Near Eastern Studies,” Princeton Alumni Weekly January 20, 1968, 6-16 13 Donner, Ibid. 3 scholarship, but also a key document in the creation of an Arab nationalist identity.”14 In Lebanon, the success of History led a newspaper to note what was otherwise obvious, even if it would be forgotten in the years to come: In upper-case letters, the article about Hitti declared: “L’HISTOIRE DES ARABES PASSE PAR LA UNIVERSITE DE PRINCETON”—the history of the Arabs passes through Princeton. From the American university, Hitti was not only writing the Arabs’ past, but shaping their horizon.15 Hitti’s students reaffirmed the hype.