Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 6 November 2024 atiya, aziz suryal (1898–1988), medievalist, orientalist, and editor-in-
chief of the coptic encyclopedia
Gawdat Gabra Keywords: Atiya, Aziz Suryal, 1898–1988; Atiya, Lola, 1917–2002; Alexandria University; Arabic and Islamic studies; University of Utah, Middle East Center; Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia; Coptic Church; Coptic Community Council; Coptic Encyclopedia; Coptology; Copts; Crusades; Eastern Christianity; Dayr al-Suryan; Dayr Anba Maqar; Institute of Coptic Studies; History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria; International Association of Coptic Studies; Monastery of St. Catherine (Mount Sinai); Pentapolis; Saladin; Shenouda iii, Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, 1923–2012.
Painting of Aziz Suryal Atiya by Alvin Gittins, 1968, located in the University of Utah’s Marriott Library Permanent Art Collection. Photograph courtesy J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. (https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6cf9qw5).
© Claremont Graduate University 1 G. Gabra: Atiya, Aziz Suryal (1898–1988) 6 November 2024 Aziz Suryal Atiya was born in al-‘Aysha in Gharbiya Province, Egypt. In 1927, he graduated from the Higher School for Teachers in Cairo. He obtained a B.A. from the University of Liverpool in Medieval and Modern History in 1931, and his Ph.D. from the University of London in Arabic and Islamic Studies in 1933. The University of Liverpool awarded him a Litt.D. in 1938 due to his meticulous work on the Crusade in the Later Middle Ages that appeared in the same year (Atiya 1938). Atiya taught at the University of London in 1934 and was invited to teach at the University of Bonn in 1935. However, because of the outbreak of the Second World War he had to return to Egypt in 1939, where he was able to work as Professor of Medieval History at Cairo University (1939–1942).
Atiya was one of the founders of Alexandria University in 1942. He served in that university as Professor of Medieval History (1942–1952) and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1949–1950). In 1946, he led an exploratory mission to the Pentapolis area in Cyrenaica (Atiya 1945; 1946). He participated in the joint expedition of Alexandria University and the American Foundation for the Study of Man in 1949–1950 to microfilm the invaluable manuscript and archival collection of the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai (Atiya 1950; 1952: 578–586; 1953a: 5–26; 1953b; 1955).
He taught as a visiting professor in a number of American universities, including the University of Michigan (1955–1956), Columbia University in New York (1956), Indiana University (1957), and Princeton University (1957–1958). In 1959, Atiya was invited to teach and to establish a center for the study of Arabic and Middle Eastern cultures at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He remained in Salt Lake City until his death (Walker 1972a; Qāmus al-Tarajim al-Qibtiya 1995: 156–158; Gabra 2008: 43–44). The University of Utah’s Middle East Center is one of the largest institutions of its kind in North America. Atiya brought his own library from Egypt to the Center, and the university subsequently dedicated $20,000 to enlarge its library. Atiya returned twice to Egypt to purchase more books from Cairo’s hidden bookshops in order to send them to the Center. He made an enormous effort to provide its library with rare books and manuscripts as well as a papyrus collection and other paper documents, the latter dating from the eighth century through the Ottoman Period (up to approximately 1517). Today, this library bears Atiya’s name (Chiarelli and Mirfakhrai 2020: 50–53; see also Walker 1972a: 7). In 1967, the University of Utah designated Atiya a Distinguished Professor of History, and he was granted the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. Furthermore, Brigham Young University in nearby Provo, Utah, made him an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.).
Atiya published more than 20 books and 92 articles; some of his books have been translated into German, Polish, French, and Arabic (Qāmus al-Tarajim al-Qibtiya 1995: 156–158; Walker 1972b). His major scholarly interests can be classified into three broad topics: the Crusades, Arabic and Islamic studies, and Coptic history and heritage. Atiya’s first publication was on the Crusade of Nicopolis (Atiya 1934). During his long academic career, Atiya published many books, articles, and book reviews on the Crusades, of which the most important appeared in 1938 and 1962 (Atiya 1938; 1962a; 1962b). One of Atiya’s final contributions to the history of the Crusades is related to the Copts (Atiya 1991b). He also made significant contributions to Arabic and Islamic studies. For example, he published a large thirteenth-century Arabic text concerning Egypt at the time of Saladin (Atiya 1943). In addition to Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 2 G. Gabra: Atiya, Aziz Suryal (1898–1988) 6 November 2024 many articles, book reviews, and entries in encyclopedias related to Arabic and Islamic studies (Walker 1972b), Atiya edited the remarkable fourteenth-century work of the Alexandrian Muslim historian al-Nuwairy Kitāb al-Ilmām (Atiya 1968–1973; 1977).
Atiya never forgot that he was a Copt. One of his earliest articles related to the Copts appeared in 1939 (Atiya 1939: 1–28). In 1952, he became a member of the coptic community council and two years later he established the institute of coptic studies, both in Cairo. In 1953, he presented a lecture to American Fulbright fellows in Egypt for 1953–1954, entitled “The Copts” (Atiya 1953c).
Atiya co-edited and translated two volumes of the
alexandria (Atiya, ‘Abd al-Masih, and Burmester 1948; 1959), one of the most significant sources for the history of the Coptic Aziz Suryal Atiya. Photograph taken in Church and the Copts. His pioneering work on the 1955–1956, courtesy of the University of history of eastern Christianity (Atiya 1968; 1980; Michigan Bentley Historical Library 2005) includes chapters on the Copts and their (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bhl/x-hs13755).
Church, the Ethiopians, Antioch and the Jacobites, the Nestorian Church, the Armenian Church, the St. Thomas Christians of South India, the Maronite Church, and Vanished Churches. It is worthy of note that Atiya dedicated nearly a third of this body of study to Copts and the Coptic Church. In 1979, he wrote an account of the Copts and Christian civilization (Atiya 1979). The entry on the Copts included in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam was contributed by Atiya (Atiya 1985: 90–95). It provides an analytical summary of the history of the Copts.
Atiya’s most important achievement and contribution to humanity, and in particular to the Copts and Coptic heritage, is undoubtedly The Coptic Encyclopedia (Atiya 1991a). His wife, Lola, who also took part in the Encyclopedia’s production, explained the story of its creation and publication, which began to be formulated decades before publication, in its foreword (Lola Atiya: 1991a). In 1976, the establishment of the international association of coptic studies had encouraged Atiya to contact scholars to fulfill his long-cherished vision of a Coptic encyclopedia. Martin Krause, the first person to occupy a university chair of coptology, was elected the first president of that association. I had the honor of attending a meeting between the two great men, Atiya and Krause, in early 1979 at Münster in Germany, while I was studying there. In September 1979, the United States National Endowment for the Humanities responded positively to Atiya’s application for a grant to fund his Coptic Encyclopedia project; it approved an outright award, along with a matching fund. A fundraising campaign began, with the blessings and support of Pope shenouda iii. Wealthy Copts, and other donors from America, Europe, Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 3 G. Gabra: Atiya, Aziz Suryal (1898–1988) 6 November 2024 and Egypt, assisted in fundraising. After the selection of a committee to establish project guidelines, consultants gathered in March 1980 in Italy and an editorial board was formed.
Its members met in September of the same year in Italy, and further meetings occurred in 1982, 1984, and 1985 in Switzerland.
Sadly, Atiya died three years before the completion of the project. Concerning this critical situation, Lola Atiya said: “Thereafter, the academic work on the Encyclopedia needed very little to come to a close, and it became my responsibility to finish the work. With the help of the present director of the Middle East Center, Lee L. Bean, the Coptic Encyclopedia now finally sees the light” (Lola Atiya 1991a: lx). She acknowledged the support of foundations, institutions, universities, scholars, benefactors, and some of the world’s churches (Lola Atiya 1991b). The Coptic Encyclopedia continues to facilitate the research of scholars while also providing nonspecialists with information about the Coptic civilization. Its importance for the Copts is definitely greater: it shows them the richness of their heritage, represented by the contributions of more than two hundred scholars contained in an eight-volume encyclopedia.
In 2009, Claremont Graduate University acquired the rights to develop an internet-based version of The Coptic Encyclopedia (Saad 2014: 294). In this electronic version, renamed the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia (cce), many existing entries have been updated—for example, the entry named dayr al-suryan: new discoveries—and new entries are continuously added, for example, a recent entry about Dayr Anba Maqar entitled dayr anba maqar, the painted hermitage of. Unlike the physical publication of The Coptic Encyclopedia a single time in 1991, the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia is an ongoing project, and it can be reached by anyone with an internet connection via its permanent website hosted by The Claremont Colleges Digital Library: https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce. A comprehensive report on the development and usage of the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia has been presented by its managing editor, Saad Michael Saad (Saad, forthcoming).