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Show AZIZ SURYAL ATIYA Historian, writer and teacher, Professor Aziz Suryal Atiya has had a long and varied career extending to the Old World and the New. Having taught in various institutions in England, Germany, Switzerland and the Middle East, he also lectured in no less than twenty American Universities since he came to this country as first Fulbright exchange professor from Egypt in 1950-51. During his present visit to America, he spent last year as Medieval Academy Visiting Professor of Islamic and Near Eastern Studies in the University of Michigan. This year, he has been selected as Henry W . Luce Professor of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in N e w York. Simultaneously he holds the Visiting Professorship of History at the Near and Middle East Institute in Columbia University. In his country of origin Dr. Atiya served in various capacities in the Egyptian universities and in the Ministry of Education. In 1950 he retired from the chairmanship of the Department of History in the University of Alexandria to become co-founder and first President of Coptic Studies in Cairo. As an author of some forty books, monographs and articles in three languages, his publications have appeared in six countries and cover a wide ran<?e of scholarship. T o the historian he is best known by his work on "The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages," a classic in its field, which the late Professor John L. La Monte described in Speculum as "a really epoch-making work in crusading historiography." T o the Orientalist he is credited with the edition of a number of important original Arabic manuscript texts, of which the most complex deals with the Age of Saladin. To the archaeologist and Biblical scholar he will be remembered for his contribution to the Mount Sinai Expedition, which microfilmed for the Library of Congress many pages of priceless manuscripts in twelve languages. Dr. Atiya was the editor of the Sinai Arabic collection on which he published a volume printed by the John Hopkins University Press. It was in the course of this expedition that he discovered the manuscript which he called "Codex Arabicus," a unique Biblical palimpsest on ancient parchment with five layers of writing in three languages - Syriac, Greek and Arabic - dating from the fourth to the ninth centuries. Equipped with western methods of research together with a wide knowledge of Western and Middle Eastern languages, both classical and modern, Dr. Atiya has devoted many years of his life to the study of the relations between the Near East and the West. His scholarly pursuits, contacts, and experiences in both the Near East and West qualify him as an interpreter of the relations between these two important areas of the world. |
