1. Ihsan Abbas was a Palestinian professor at the American University of Beirut, and was considered a premier figure of Arabic and Islamic studies in the East and West during the 20th century.
21 Facts About Ihsan Abbas
1. 2.
The "author of over one hundred books", during his career, Abbas was renowned as one of the foremost scholars of Arabic language and literature and was a respected literary critic.
3.
Ihsan Abbas was born in the former Palestinian village of Ayn Ghazal near Haifa on December 2,1920, though the village's population was forced to leave in 1948 at the time of the 1948 War, and was destroyed during Operation Shoter.
4.
Ihsan Abbas then spent the next four years teaching at a college in Safed and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in Arabic literature from Cairo University in 1950; for the next ten years, Ihsan Abbas traveled between his study at Cairo where he earned a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, and his work at Gordon Memorial College or, as it became known during his tenure, the University of Khartoum.
5.
Ihsan Abbas remained active, performing post-retirement research projects for the University of Jordan, especially on Andalusian Arabic literature and the translation of world literature to the Arabic language.
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Ihsan Abbas was often at the center of intellectual life wherever he was living, and camaraderie with his colleagues was an important part of his life.
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Ihsan Abbas was an avid participant in the cafe gatherings of Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo during the 1950s and 1960s.
8.
Ihsan Abbas died in Amman, Jordan on January 29,2003, at the age of 82 after a prolonged illness.
9.
Ihsan Abbas was distinguished as a Palestinian figure who defended contributions to Arabic and Islamic studies by Israeli scholarship, on one occasion reacting angrily to when a student claimed that Israeli academia was unable to master the Arabic language, a claim that Ihsan Abbas found to be racist.
10.
Ihsan Abbas echoed the sentiment that in Arabic poetry, the description of the city as a genre and the details of urban life revealed the writer's ideological biases.
11.
Ihsan Abbas was a defender of Kahlil Gibran's maligned Al-Mawakib, considering it a measuring stick for the literature produced by the Arabic renaissance in the United States.
12.
Ihsan Abbas was a celebrated man of letters and a prolific writer during his lifetime.
13.
Ihsan Abbas republished Ibn Bassam's 12th-century biographical dictionary of the Iberian Peninsula's intellectuals, editing it into eight "mammoth" volumes.
14.
Ihsan Abbas contributed significantly to the history of Arabic literature and writers, and was responsible for collecting and compiling the work of Abd al-Hamid al-Katib in 1988, uncovering archived letters between the Umayyad secretary and the empire's last caliph which shed light on the inner workings of the dynasty in its last days.
15.
Ihsan Abbas was one of the few writers to critically analyze the Kharijites, a now extinct sect of Islam.
16.
Ihsan Abbas was responsible for reviving the works of Ibn Hazm, one of the main philosophers of the school and of Islam in general, editing and republishing many of them and even uncovering previously unpublished works on Ibn Hazm's legal theory from various archives; Abbas' 1983 edition of Ibn Hazm's book on legal theory Ihkam is considered a key moment in Arab intellectual history and the modernist revival of Zahirite legal method.
17.
Ihsan Abbas participated in a number of collaborative projects during his career.
18.
Ihsan Abbas served, alongside Clifford Edmund Bosworth, Jacob Lassner, Ehsan Yarshater and Franz Rosenthal, on the editorial board for William Montgomery Watt's book Muhammad at Mecca, itself a partial translation and summary of Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari's History of the Prophets and Kings.
19.
From 1951 to 1952, Ihsan Abbas assisted fellow scholar Ahmad Amin and his student Shawqi Daif in editing and republishing an anthology of Egyptian contributions to Arabic poetry during the Middle Ages, which had previously been thought to be minimal or non-existent.
20.
Ihsan Abbas earned the King Faisal International Prize from the King Faisal Foundation in 1980.
21.
Ihsan Abbas was a significant contributor to the cultural magazine Al-Arabi, and was the Arabic translator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.