Wolfhart Heinrichs

Wolfhart Heinrichs , full name Wolfhart Peter Heinrichs , (born October 3, 1941 in Cologne , † January 23, 2014 ) was a German Islamic scholar , Arabist and Graeco-Arabist .

Life

Wolfhart Heinrichs was born into an academic family. His father Matthias Heinrichs was professor of Old High German at the University of Gießen and at the Free University of Berlin , his mother, Anne Heinrichs, a professor for Old Norse who qualified as a professor at the age of 70 , was appointed professor at the Free University of Berlin at the age of 80 .

He attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Cologne and then studied Islamic Studies , Semitic Studies and Philosophy at the local university . After a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London , he continued his studies at the Universities of Frankfurt and Giessen . In 1967 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Hazim Al-Qartaganni's reception of Aristotelian poetics . He then spent a year at the Orient Institute in Beirut and then taught at the University of Giessen from 1968 to 1977. After a visiting professor at Harvard University , he accepted a permanent position there in 1978. In 1980 he married Alma Giese, a private scholar and translator from Arabic. In 1989 he became co-editor of the new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam , for which he himself wrote fifty articles. In 1996 he succeeded Muhsin Mahdi as James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University.

Research priorities

Heinrichs saw himself as a philologist in the true sense of the word. One of his priorities was Arabic poetry and its poetics, as well as the Arabic translation of Aristotle's poetics . Another work was devoted to the New Aramaic dialect Turoyo , other works to Arabic rhetoric and Arabic prosimetry .

Fonts (selection)

• Early Ornate Prose and the Rhetorization of Poetry in Arabic Literature. In: Frédérique Woerther (Ed.), Literary and Philosophical Rhetoric in the Greek, Roman, Syriac and Arabic Worlds , Hildesheim, Olms 2009, Ss. 215-234.
• (Ed. With Peri Bearman and Bernard G. Weiss): The law applied: contextualizing the Islamic Shari'a: a volume in honor of Frank E. Vogel. London, New York, IB Tauris, 2008.
• The part and the whole: the auto-anthology Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillīs. In: Asian Studies 59: 3 (2005), pp. 675-696
• Prosimetrical Genres in Classical Arabic Literature. In: J. Harris and K. Reichl (eds.), Prosimetrum, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Poetry. Cambridge, DS Brewer, 1997, pp. 249-275
• (Ed. With J. Christoph Bürgel) Oriental Middle Ages. Wiesbaden, AULA-Verlag, 1990.
• (Ed.) Studies in Neo-Aramaic. Atlanta, Ga., Scholars Press, 1989.
• The hand of the northwind. Opinions on metaphor and the early meaning of istiʼāra in Arabic poetics. Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1977.
• Arabic poetry and Greek poetics. Hāzim al-Qartāğannīs foundation of poetics with the help of Aristotelian terms. Wiesbaden, F. Steiner in Komm. 1969.

literature

• Beatrice Gruendler, Michael Cooperson (Eds.): Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on His 65th Birthday Presented by his Students and Colleagues. Brill, Leiden 2008, (preface with curriculum vitae, table of contents, excerpt online)

Web links

• Harvard University, Islamic Studies: Obituary Notice
• Harvard University, Avigail Noy: Wolfhart P. Heinrichs, 1941–2014
• Wolfhart Peter Heinrichs. Memorial Minute - Faculty of Arts and Sciences in: Harvard Gazette, July 16, 2015