Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Philip Hitti: problems

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I was praising the literary quality of Philip Hitti's work and his mastery of knowledge about the subject he was writing about. It is like the joy of reading the first 100 pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  Hitti was most skilled in writing about events and in keeping the attention of the readers. He can be criticized for failing to provide grand theories or approaches to history, and for being cautious in drawing conclusions and in identifying underlying causes.  Albert Hourani once told us about meeting Hitti at his parants' home in the UK: Albert was a young student at the time and asked Hitti about his History of the Arabs.  Hourani asked Hitti was to why he ignored the Ottoman centuries from his history, and Hitti answered by saying that the Arabs had no history under the Ottoman.  Hourani told us that he wrote his history book to compensate for that shortcoming (of course, Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples is the weakest of his work and fell way short of the scope and grandiosity of Hitti's history--it reads as a rushed work and Hourani wrote it in his waning years).  Hitti also suffers from a particular (non-historical) interest in the plight of Christians in the Arab world at the expense of other minorities. But he was not an apologist to any side and would--on account of historical evidence, or lack there off--dismiss a major element in the popular history of the region, as he did when he maintained that the `Umar ibn Al-Khattab's Pact about Christians probably did not exist.  He unwittingly contributed to the formation of Lebanese ahistorical nationalism, among other problems.  Hitti's history (as opposed to Hanna Batatu) was focused more on the upper classes and royal households.