History of The Arabs

By Philip Khuri Hitti

Book Overview

This authoritative study of the Arabians and the Arabic-speaking peoples is a work of great thoroughness and insight which contains much to satisfy general readers as well as scholars. Here is the story of the rise of Islam in the Middle Ages, its conquests, its empire, its time of greatness and of decay, unrolling one of the richest and most instructive panoramas in history. For this reissue of the tenth edition, Walid Khalidi gives a brief overview of the history and content of the book, and emphasises the vital importance of Philip K. Hitti's magisterial and scholarly work to on-going attempts to bridge the Arab/Western cultural divide.

This accessible text is ideal not only for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Arabic and Islamic studies, but also for the general reader and many scholars in various fields of history.

New to this Edition:
- Fully updated with the results of new research
- Contains a new Preface by a leading academic in the field, which highlights the importance of this book to past and present attempts to close the cultural gap between the Arab and Western worlds

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0333631420
• ISBN13: 9780333631423
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 822 Pages
• Weight: 2.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

The Need to Know

My Experience so far in reading and understanding other people's religious beliefs has increase tremendously, it i always good to be versatile so as to keep up. The book "History of the Arabs" has helped to understand beyond all mediocre readings. Thanks for availing me the opportunity of buying at my finger tips. Warm Regards Banky

dated but valuable

I sympathize with reviewers who were offended by this book. There are, especially towards the beginning of the book, some generalizations that make me wince. And Hitti's vocabulary is full of obsolete ethnographic and anthropological terms that raise ugly associations with colonial racial ideas. Hitti wrote with the simplicity of scholars before multiculturalism and postmodernism, for whom the peoples of the world were specimens to be analyzed without regard to cultural sensitivity. Other scholars with encyclopedic knowledge of the Arabic peoples from Hitti's time were prone to generalizations: H. G. Farmer, who wrote the definitive book on Arabian music, was prone to say things like "As with all the Semites . . ." But while Hitti may not have the cultural sensitivity of today's writers, his depth of knowledge is astonishing, and he writes beautifully. Where Hourani tells us relatively vaguely how things happened over centuries, Hitti shows us the singers of Medina, the philosophers of Baghdad, the slaves of Persia. Where Hourani's book is a good history, Hitti's book is also a work of art. Yes, be advised that Hitti's work is riddled with obsolete ideas, but also be aware that the very richness of his account argues against any stereotypes that he might have professed.

A Great Work

This is one of the best popular works about the Arabs. Given that it was written several decades ago, many attitudes have been disproven and new research has added to our understanding, but the overwhelming majority of this book is still valid. It is written in an acedemic and readable manner. This is Philip Hitti's magnum opus, and it is a great one.