Philip K. Hitti (1886–1978)

I stole a library book once. It was this one.

I was a child, with no conception how to buy a book, beyond science fiction and cheap classics at my local newsagents. Besides, I wasn’t so well-behaved at that stage. We were leaving the area, and this book came with me…

It was my first major history book; perhaps my first ever history book. I had watched Lawrence of Arabia and been ‘crazed with the spell of far Arabia’ (Walter de le Mare). This book was every bit as romantic to me; I read more assiduously than I believe I have since I turned twenty: my ill-gotten copy has the neatest marks with ruler and pencil in twelve places on every page, even when we’re in the ‘Nabataean and Other Petty Kingdoms’. Further on, my imagination fell in love with Khalid ibn al-Walid of the early conquests – he was my hero, but there were a dozen other figures with whom I struck up a personal relationship.

Hitti is so in-depth and detailed that a kid can do that. His people came alive for me; history came alive.

This work is magisterial, as they say. It’s grand, engaging, deeply learned, vast in scope. It presents the history of the Arabs and then the wider Muslim world – so that the title itself is arguably too narrow – from ancient kingdoms in Arabia, to his own day: 1937 (the 1st edition: by the time I got my hands on the book, it had been through ten).

Yesterday I took it out again. I browsed reviews and saw it accused of a language we don’t use nowadays. At a glance, I think this problem is confined to the opening pages, where he talks of the characteristics of the Semitic races. It’s how they talked and thought: you have to make allowances, if you’re going to read 1930s history, as I do too in my other magisterial history, Rene Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes, 1939. Yet the Hitti, unlike Grousset, is an insider’s account: he was a Christian Syrian, a professor at Princeton. I’ll say for 1930s history too, that it can be free of prejudices which have come into existence since their time.

We now like to publish histories from a non-Western standpoint: Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted, or the Crusades through Arab eyes (Amin Maalouf). But Hitti was this, too. Yesterday I read his sections on the Saljuqs and on the Crusades. I did so straight after a chapter on Turks in The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, 2009 – and the differences leapt out at me. In Hitti, Saljuqs are allowed to be glorious when they restored a unity to the Muslim world, whereas in the Cambridge they were seen from a Byzantine standpoint, as hordes who ‘swarm’ in from their ‘breeding-grounds’. There’s none of that in Hitti. After seeing the word ‘horde’ used exclusively and often of Turks in the Cambridge, I had to laugh when Hitti introduces the Crusaders as the ‘motley hordes of Christendom’.

This may well remain my favourite history book; it’s ahead on points from the valiant Frenchman Rene Grousset, who besides was less learned I suppose.

I have just purchased the new standard history, A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani. But I hear it has less detail; I don’t quite expect the discovery of undreamt things and engagement with personalities, that I got with Hitti. I still remember my astonishment and entrancement when he described the 1st century castle of Ghumdan in one of the ancient states of South Arabia:

The citadel, according to these geographers, had twenty stories, each ten cubits high – the first skyscraper in recorded history. It was built of granite, porphyry and marble. The king had his court installed in the uppermost story, the roof of which was covered with one slab of stone so transparent that one could look through it skyward and distinguish between a crow and a kite. The four facades were constructed of stones of various colours. At each corner-stone stood a brazen lion which roared whenever the wind blew. In a poem al-Hamdani refers to the clouds as the turban of Ghumdan and marble as its belt.

Composed in a fine historian’s hand. Surely one of the great books.… (more)