MODERN ARAB HISTORIANS AND WORLD HISTORY 1

The study of modern Arab historiography has hardly begun. Orientalists in Europe and America, as well as Arab historians, until very recently were interested only in medieval Islam and in the classical history of the Arabs. This is why works on Muslim and Arab historiography like those of Wiistenfeld, Margoliouth, and Rosenthal have concerned themselves only with classical Arab historians until the end of the Mamlfik period in the early sixteenth century. Increasing interest in the modem history of the Arabs, however, is beginning to emphasize the necessity of studying the modern historians and historical literature of the Arab world in the period of Ottoman rule and in the post-war period after 1920. There is not yet one comprehensive work on the subject, but one Arab author at least, Professor Jam51 al-Din Shayyal, has written a short book on “History and Historians in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century” (Cairo, 1958). 2 The department of Arab Studies at the American University of Beirut devoted its ninth annual conference (18-22 May, 1959) to the study of Arab historiography in the last one hundred years, but the papers presented were almost exclusively centered on modern historical literature relating to various periods of classical Arab history. Not one paper was read on the work of Arab historians on modern Arab history. General or special works on the history of Arabic literature, like those of C. Brockelmann, Jurji Zaydan and Louis Cheikho, have dealt to some extent with modern Arabic historical literature. I t is also good to notice that contemporary writers on modern Arab and Islamic history, such as Gibb and Bowen, S. H. Longrigg, Muhammad Kurd Ah, Asad Rustum, M. Shafiq Ghurbal, and Abbas el-Azeawi, have utilized the historical literature left by the chroniclers, annalists, biographers and other writers since the sixteenth century. But the fact remains that although the Arabic historical literature of the last four centuries and a half is fairly vast and valuable, yet a good deal of it is either unexplored or poorly known. It has not received serious study because, as we said at the beginning, the whole period with which it deals has only just begun to command the interest of historians, and perhaps because it does not include works of the caliber and importance of those written by classical historians such as Tabari, Mascfidi and Ibn-Khaldfin. One of the characteristics of modern Arab historians is that their interest has gone beyond the history of their country so as to cover in varying degrees various areas and periods of world history. The claim that Arab historians have rarely concerned themselves with the writing