Aziz S. Atiya was born in an Egyptian village shortly before the turn of the twentieth century. His education began in Egypt and was continued in England, where he secured a Ph.D. in 1933 from the University of London and D.Litt. from the University of Liverpool in 1938. He was awarded the Charles Beard Fellowship as well as the Ramsay Muir Fellowship in 1931 and the University Fellowship in 1932 from the University of Liverpool for outstanding scholarship in Mediaeval History. In America he was granted three more doctorates in an honorary capacity: an LL.D. from Brigham Young University in 1968 and two doctorates of Humane Letters, from Baldwin-Wallace College in 1962, and from the University of Utah in 1968.

Professor Atiya’s teaching career began with a Tutorship in the University of London School of Oriental Studies in 1934, followed by a Professorship of Midiaeval (including Oriental) History in the University of Bonn in Germany from 1936 to 1939. He returned to Egypt after the outbreak of World War II, became the First History Inspector for Egyptian Secondary Education from 1939 to 1940, then Professor of Midiaeval History in Cairo University from 1940 and in Alexandria University from 1945 to 1954. He was elected first Fulbright scholar from Egypt in 1951 and as such acted as Consultant to the Library of Congress as well as lecturing at many American universities.

Professor Atiya was later invited back to the United States as Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for the year 1955-56. The following academic year he occupied another Visiting Professorship of History at Columbia University together with the Henry W. Luce Professorship of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. Simultaneously, he was elected Patten Lecturer of the year at Indiana University. He accepted a similar appointment in the following year (1957-58) at Princeton University and became a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1958-59. At the end of his term at the Institute, the University of Utah offered him a tenured position as Professor of Languages and History. He founded its Middle East Center and its significant Middle East Library, and in 1967 he was named Distinguished Professor of History.

Immediately before coming to the United States, Professor Atiya established the Institute of Coptic Studies and became its first President in 1954. He also was elected Corresponding Member of the Society of Coptic Archaeology as well as UNESCO International Committee for the Cultural History of Mankind. Among a number of similar memberships of learned academies and societies, he was elected one of four Orientalists in the world to be Honored Fellow of the Middle East Association of North America.

Long recognized as a leading authority in the fields of Midiaeval Studies and the Near East with a concentration of the Crusades and East-West relations, Professor Atiya has published widely, many of his books appearing in translation and in several editions. Among his most influential works are the “Crusades in the Later Middle Ages” (1938), “A History of the Egyptian Patriarchs” (1948-59), “Crusade, Commerce, and Culture” (1962), and “A History of Eastern Christianity” (1968). His academic achievements were crowned in 1991, two years after his death, with the publishing of the “Coptic Encyclopedia”, a monumental piece of work that engaged Professor Atiya for the last twenty years of his life.

Photo courtesy of the University of Utah