PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This is a modest attempt to tell the story of the Arabians and the Arabic-speaking peoples from the earliest times to the Ottoman conquest of the early sixteenth century. It represents many years of study and teaching at Columbia University, the American University of Beirut and Princeton University, and is designed to me et the needs of the student as well as the cultivated layman. The field it covers, however, is so extensive that the author cannot claim to have carried his independent researches into every part of it. He therefore had to appropriate in places the results of the investigation of other scholars in the East and in the West, to whom his indebtedness would have been more apparent had the selected bibliographies appended to each chapter in the manuscript appeared in the printed book....