Atiya, Aziz Suryal, 1898-1988

Aziz Suryal Atiya (1898-1988) was a prominent scholar, writer, historian, and librarian whose expertise spanned the fields of the Crusades, Islamic and Coptic studies. Born in a small village in Egypt, Atiya was sent at the age of five to a school in Cairo and moved to the University of Liverpool in England to continue his studies. In 1931 he earned a B.A. with first-class honors in Medieval and Modern History and transferred to the University of London, where he completed his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies in 1933. By the time of the publication of his indispensable work on the Crusades, Atiya could also speak Egyptian, English, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Latin, and to a lesser extent, Spanish, Greek, Coptic, Turkish, Welsh, and Dutch. In 1936, Atiya began his career in publishing with The Crusades of Nicopolis . His monumental study of the Crusades, The Crusades in the Later Middle Ages, was published in 1938. In the same year, the University of Liverpool awarded him a D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters). He was the first non-Briton from the Middle East ever to be granted that distinction. From 1935 to 1939, Atiya served as Docent and Honorary Professor of Medieval (including Oriental) History for Kahle's Orientalisches Seminar in Bonn, Germany. In 1939, however, he returned to Egypt and became First History Inspector of the Secondary Schools for the ministry of Education. He also began a tenure as Professor of Medieval History at Cairo University, which lasted until 1942. In that year, he moved to Alexandria University, where he held a foundation chair in Medieval History until 1952, and served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1949-1950) and as Chairman of the History Department (1952-1954). During this period in Egypt, Atiya married, became the father of two children, and participated in many academic expeditions. After an extensive lecture tour in the United States from 1950 through 1951, Atiya felt the desire to go abroad again. For the 1955 through 1956 session, he served the University of Michigan as Medieval Academy Visiting Professor of Arabic Studies, and then accepted a position at the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. In 1957, he was Patten Visiting Professor and Lecturer at Indiana University. That year's lectures became his two books Crusade, Commerce, and Culture, and Crusade Historiography and Bibliography . He then spent two years at Princeton as Professor of Arabic and Islamic History (1957-1958) and then as a member of the Institute of Advanced Study (1958-1959). In 1959, Atiya came to the University of Utah as a Professor of Languages and History to build a complete center for the study of Arabic and Middle East cultures. At the University of Utah, Atiya founded the Middle East Center and created the Aziz S. Atiya Middle East Library, a division of the Marriott Library. In 1967 he was designated Distinguished Professor of History, and was further granted the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. Brigham Young University, at the same time, made him an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.), in recognition of some of this discoveries in the world of papyri. During this time, Atiya continued to publish major academic works. In 1968, he published The History of Eastern Christianity and in 1969, he organized the publication of Catalogue Raisonne of the Arabic Manuscripts of Mount Sinai . At the time of his death, Atiya was preparing to publish a multi-volume Coptic Encyclopedia, which was completed under the direction of his wife and assistant, Lola Atiya. Overall, Atiya published approximately twenty books, many of which are multi-volume projects. His journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles appeared regularly over a period of thirty-five years.

From the guide to the Aziz Suryal Atiya papers, 1927-1993, (J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)