Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on His 65th Birthday Presented by His Students and Colleagues

Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on His 65th Birthday Presented by His Students and Colleagues. Edited by Beatrice Gruendler with the assistance of Michael Cooperson. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Pp. xxxvi + 611. $223.

One afternoon in early 2000 1 sat opposite Wolfhart Heinrichs (WH) over lunch in a Thai restaurant. I was spending the year in Cambridge, Mass., pursuing Indian Ocean interests. Conversation turned to the Islands of Wäq al-wäq and he asked me whether I had "tracked down the reference"; the reference was one he had suggested in Miami in 1997 after I presented "Waqwaq Revisited and Resituated" at that year's annual meeting of the American Oriental Society. "I think," he said back then, "that Daunicht made a case for the Moluccas or New Guinea as a location, even Australia, at the meeting of the Union européenne des arabisants et d'islamisants in 1978." I marveled that he remembered my Miami paper, and his suggestion, three years later, just as I had marveled in 1997 that he had remembered the Daunicht paper from two decades earlier. I recount this anecdote because it illustrates two fundamental aspects of this formidable scholar: his encyclopedic knowledge and his generosity, especially with would-be scholars.

WH's generosity is evoked several times in the acknowledgements (pp. ix-xi) and preface (pp. xiiixix) of the volume under review (hereafter CAH) by the editor, Beatrice Gruendler, and her sous-chef, Michael Cooperson. It is captured as follows in the closing paragraph of the preface:

It is a commonplace of classical Arabic biography to remark of a great scholar that intatta ilayhi l-cilm, "all knowledge available ended up with him." From an American perspective, it certainly seems that much of twentieth- century Arabic philology (among other fields) ended up with Wolfhart Heinrichs, who, most fortunately for us, has always been willing to share, no questions asked, (p. xix)

The appreciation of WH's students and colleagues for that generosity is captured also in the tabula gratulatoria of eighty-five names, but it is, of course, best reflected in the twenty-one contributions to CAH, nine of which are by former students. Every student of WH, indeed every acquaintance, will know also that he is seldom without his wife at his side, a superlative...