Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb

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Not to be confused with A. Hamilton Gibbs.

Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb (2 January 1895 – 22 October 1971), also commonly referred to as "H. A. R. Gibb", was a Scottish historian onOrientalism.

Contents   [hide]  1 Early life and education 2 Military service 3 Family 4 Life 5 Associations 6 Bibliography 7 Sources 8 External links

[edit]Early life and education

Gibb was born on Wednesday, 2 January 1895, in Alexandria, Egypt, to Alexander Crawford Gibb (son of John Gibb of Gladstone, Renfrenshire, Scotland) and Jane Ann Gardner (of Greenock, Scotland). Alexander Crawford died in 1897, following which Gardner took up a teaching position in Alexandria. Hamilton returned to Scotland for his formal education at the age of five: first, four years of private tuition, after which he started at the Royal High School, Edinburgh in 1904, staying until 1912. His education was focused on classics, though it included French, German, and the physical sciences. In 1912, Hamilton matriculated at Edinburgh University, joining the new honors program in Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic). Hamilton's mother died in 1913 as he was studying in his second year at the university.

[edit]Military service

During World War I Gibb broke off his studies at the University of Edinburgh to serve for the British Royal Regiment of Artillery in France (from February 1917) and for several months in Italy as a commissioned officer. (He was commissioned at the age of 19.)

He was awarded a "war privilege" Master of Arts because of his service, until the Armistice with Germany in November 1918.

[edit]Family

Gibb had two children: a son, Ian (1923–2005), and a daughter, Dorothy (1926–?).

[edit]Life

After the war Gibb studied Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, gaining his MA in 1922. His thesis, published later by theRoyal Asiatic Society as a monograph, was on the Arab conquests of Central Asia.

The same year he married Helen Jessie Stark (Ella), and together they had one son and one daughter.

From 1921 to 1937 Gibb taught Arabic at the then School of Oriental Studies, becoming a professor there in 1930. During this time he was an editor of theEncyclopaedia of Islam.

In 1937 Gibb succeeded D. S. Margoliouth as Laudian Professor of Arabic with a Fellowship at St John's College, Oxford, where he stayed for eighteen years. Gibb's Mohammedanism, published in 1949, became the basic text used by Western students of Islam for a generation.^{[citation needed]}

In 1955, Gibb became the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and University Professor at Harvard University. This honorific title is conferred on select scholars "working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties."^{[citation needed]} Later, he became Director of Harvard Center For Middle Eastern Studies and as such became a leader of the movement in American universities to set up centers of Regional science, bringing together teachers, researchers and students in different disciplines to study the culture and society of a region of the world.

Harvard named a library, the Gibb Islamic Seminar Library, in his honor.

[edit]Associations

• Fellow of: British Academy, Danish Academy, American Philosophical Society
• Honorary fellow of: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Medieval Academy of America
• Member of: Academy of Arabic Language (Cairo), Institut d'Egypte (Associate Member), Arabic Academy (Damascus) (Honorary), Arabic Academy (Iraq)

[edit]Bibliography

• Arabic Literature - An Introduction (1926), also (1963), Clarendon Press and (1974), Oxford University Press.
• Ibn Batuta, 1304-1377 (1929), (Arabic: Tuhfat al-'anzar fi ghara'ib al-'amsar‎), English translation by Gibb.
• Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354 (1929), translated and selected with an introduction and notes, R. M. McBride. ISBN 8120608097
• Note by Professor H. A. R. Gibb (1939), from Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Part I. C I (b) Annex I, p. 400-02.
• Modern Trends in Islam (1947).
• Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (1949) retitled Islam: An Historical Survey (1980), Oxford.

• Online Chapter The Koran
• Online Chapter The Sharia

• Islamic Society and the West with Harold Bowen (vol. 1 1950, vol. 2 1957).
• Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam (1953), edited with J. H. Kramers, Brill.
• The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1954- ), new ed. Edited by a number of leading orientalists, including Gibb, under the patronage of the International Union of Academies. Leiden: Brill, along with that edited by J. H. Kramers, and E. Levi-Provençal.
• "Islamic Biographical Literature," (1962) in Historians of the Middle East, eds. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt, Oxford U. Press.
• Studies on the Civilization of Islam (1982), Princeton U. Press.