Muhsin Mahdi

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Muḥsin Mahdī (June 21, 1926–July 9, 2007) was universally acclaimed as the doyen of medieval Arabic and Islamic philosophy. He was born and raised in the Shiite pilgrimage city of Kerbala, Iraq. After finishing high school in Baghdad, he was awarded a government scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut, where he earned both a B.B.A. and a B.A. in philosophy. He taught for a year at the University of Baghdad before coming to the United States in 1948, where he earned an M.A. and Ph.D.(1954) at the University of Chicago. Here he studied at the famed Oriental Institute under Nabia Abbott and began his life-long exploration of political philosophy under the guidance of Leo Strauss. His dissertation on Ibn Khaldun was quickly recognized as a path-breaking study. After two more years in Baghdad, Mahdi returned to Chicago, where he taught in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from 1958-1969. At Harvard University (from 1969 until his retirement in 1996),as James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic, he served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and also as Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Thoroughly versed not only in medieval Arabic, ancient Greek, medieval Jewish and Christian philosophy but also modern Western political philosophy, Mahdi had an incomparable command of the Arabic language in its rich and varied historical and geographical manifestations. Thoroughly grounded in the methods of critical editions of manuscripts developed by European scholars for the ancient and medieval texts, he passionately desired to establish the same rigorous standards in the fields of Arabic philology and philosophy. He devoted much of his career to searching for manuscripts wherever his travels took him. He is especially known for the recovery, edition, translation and interpretation of many of the works of Alfarabi, the ninth-century (CE)founder of political philosophy in the Islamic world. A demanding, inspiring and beloved teacher. he emphasized meticulous analysis and exegesis of philosophic texts in Arabic. With Prof. Ralph Lerner at Chicago and Prof. Ernest Fortin at Boston College, he co-edited Medieval Political Philosophy, a path-breaking sourcebook that includes selections in translation from Arabic, Hebrew and Latin texts.

Having discredited many times over the Orientalist notion that Arabs were merely passive transmitters of Greek philosophy, he is equally famous for his critical edition of a core of tales that would be expanded into the quintessential Orientalist phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond, the One Thousand and One Nights.

Best-known works

• Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History: A Study in the Philosophical Foundation of the Science of Culture. His doctoral dissertation of 1954, published 1957.
• The Thousand and One Nights [Alf Layla wa Layla] 2 vols. Brill (Leiden) 1984.
• NB The Arabian Nights: based on the text of the fourteenth-century manuscript ed. by Muhsin Mahdi. Translated by Husain Haddawy. Everyman's Library, 1992.
• Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy. 2001.
• Al-Kindi, le catalogue de la bibliothèque de l'Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales lists more works

Alternate spellings

Muhsin Mahdi, Muhsin S. Mahdi, Muḥsin Mahdī

External links

• Steven J. Lenzner: An Unsurpassed Scholar
• Biography
• Twelve FAS Faculty Members to Retire