They said about Islam (7)

 

Philip K. Hitti in 'History of the Arabs' said :

“Islam does not set impossible goals. There are no mythological intricacies in this message. No hidden meanings or secrets and absolutely no priesthood.”

: He also said 

“Within a brief span of mortal life, Muhammad called forth of unpromising material, a nation, never welded before; in a country that was hitherto but a geographical expression he established a religion which in vast areas suppressed Christianity and Judaism, and laid the basis of an empire that was soon to embrace within its far flung boundaries the fairest provinces the then civilized world.”

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Philip Khuri Hitti (22 June 1886 – 24 December 1978) was a Lebanese-American professor and scholar at Princeton and Harvard University, and authority on Arab and Middle Eastern history, Islam, and Semitic languages. He almost single-handedly created the discipline of Arabic studies in the United States. His grandniece was Christa McAuliffe, who was killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986.

 Hitti was born in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, on 22 June 1886, into a Maronite Christian family, in the village of Shemlan some 25 km southeast from Beirut, up in Mount Lebanon.

He was educated at an American Presbyterian mission school at Suq al-Gharb and then at the Syrian Protestant College. After graduating in 1908 he taught there before moving to Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in 1915 and taught Semitic languages. After World War I he returned to Lebanon and taught there until 1926. In February 1926 he was offered a Chair at Princeton University, which he held until he retired in 1954. During World War II, he taught Arabic to servicemen at Princeton through the Army Specialized Training Program (including future Ambassador Rodger Paul Davies). Hitti was both Professor of Semitic Literature and Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages. After formal retirement he accepted a position at Harvard University. He also taught in the summer schools at the University of Utah and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He subsequently held a research position at the University of Minnesota. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, on 24 December 1978.

 Some of his works: 

 

• The Syrians in America (1924)
• An Arab-Syrian Gentleman in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munqidh (1929)
• History of the Arabs (1937)
• The Arabs: A Short History (1943)
• History of Syria: including Lebanon and Palestine (1951)
  

• The Near East in History (1961)
• Islam and the West (1962)
  

• Makers of Arab History (1968)
• Islam: A Way of Life (1970)
• Capital cities of Arab Islam (1973)