Philip Khuri Hitti (Arabic:فيليب خوري حتي; 22 June 1886 – 24 December 1978) was a Lebanese-American professor and scholar atPrinceton andHarvard University, and authority onArab andMiddle Eastern history,Islam, andSemitic languages. He almost single-handedly created the discipline ofArabic studies in the United States.[1][2] His grandniece wasChrista McAuliffe, who was killed in theSpace ShuttleChallenger disaster in January 1986.[3]
Philip Khuri Hitti was born in theMount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, on 22 June 1886, into aMaronite Christian family, in the village ofShemlan some 25 km southeast fromBeirut, up inMount Lebanon.
He was educated at an AmericanPresbyterian mission school atSuq al-Gharb and then at theSyrian Protestant College. After graduating in 1908 he taught there before moving toColumbia University, where he earned his PhD in 1915 and taughtSemitic languages. AfterWorld War I he returned to Lebanon and taught there until 1926. In February 1926 he was offered a Chair atPrinceton University, which he held until he retired in 1954. DuringWorld War II, he taught Arabic to servicemen at Princeton through theArmy Specialized Training Program (including future AmbassadorRodger Paul Davies).[2][4] Hitti was both Professor of Semitic Literature and Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages. After formal retirement he accepted a position atHarvard University. He also taught in the summer schools at the University of Utah and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He subsequently held a research position at the University of Minnesota. He died inPrinceton, New Jersey, on 24 December 1978.
In 1944 before a U. S. House committee, Hitti gave testimony in support of the view that there was no historical justification for a Jewish homeland in the Palestine. His testimony was reprinted in thePrinceton Herald. In response,Albert Einstein and his friend and colleagueErich Kahler jointly replied in the same newspaper with their counter-arguments. Hitti then published a response and Einstein and Kahler concluded the debate in thePrinceton Herald with their second response.[5] In 1945 Hitti served as an adviser to the Iraqi delegation at theSan Francisco Conference which established theUnited Nations. In 1946, Hitti was the first Lebanese-American witness at theAnglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine.Bartley Crum, an American member of the committee, recalled:
Hitti... explained that there was actually no such entity as Palestine - never had been; it was historically part of Syria, and "the Sunday schools have done a great deal of harm to us because by smearing the walls of classrooms with maps of Palestine, they associate it with the Jews in the minds of the average American and Englishman."
He traced the history of Palestine back 7000 years. All that time, he said, it had been the immemorial home of the Arabs. He asserted that Zionism was indefensible and unfeasible on moral, historic and practical grounds. It was an imposition on the Arabs of an alien way of life which they resented and to which they would never submit.[6]
Mr. Hitti, who was the first director of Princeton's Near Eastern Studies program, was considered a leading authority in the United States on Arabic and Islamic culture and one of the first persons in any American university to appreciate and promote the importance of the Arab world in this country.
History of the Arabs, first published in 1937 and now going into its tenth edition, is probably the single most important book ever published in America on the subject of Arabs. "There is no comparable book on the subject," an Arab historian in Beirut said recently. "On the Arabs alone, nothing in the West since 1937 has matched Hitti's contribution."
Her maternal grandfather was of Lebanese Maronite descent and she was the great-niece of the renowned Lebanese-American historian and Harvard professor Philip Hitti.
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