Name Hichem Djait Era 20th-century philosophy | Main interests Islamic studies | |
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Born 6 December 1935 (age 88)
Tunis, Tunisia ( 1935-12-06 ) Major works The Great Fitna (1989)
The Life of Muhammad (2007) Books Europe and Islam, Islamic Culture in Crisis: A Reflection on Civilizations in History | ||
Hichem Djait (Tunisian Arabic: هشام جعيط), (born December 6, 1935) is a prominent historian and scholar of Islam.
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Biography
Djait was born in Tunis, Tunisia to a conservative upper-middle-class family. His erudite father and some of his uncles and relatives were Islamic sages (or sheikhs), which made the name of the Djait family become traditionally associated with the Zeytouna Mosque as well as with Islamic Fiqh and Iftah (or jurisprudence). He had his secondary education at Sadiki College, where he studied French, world literature, Western philosophy, Arabic, and Islamic Studies. His training at Sadiki College made him discover Enlightenment thinkers and the ideals of the Renaissance and the Reformation which were rather different from the teachings of his family's conservative milieu.
Djait later travelled to France where he received the "Aggregation" diploma in History in 1962. His PhD in Arts and Humanities was defended in Paris in 1981. Today, Djait is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Tunis. He is also a visiting professor at the McGill University and the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to the numerous honorary titles and awards he received , Djait was appointed president of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts on February 17, 2012.
Professor Djait is a specialist in Middle-Age Islamic history. In the many books he published in Tunisia and France, he mainly deals with various subjects related to Arab-Islamic culture, history and philosophy as well as to the relationship between Islam and modernity and the place of Islam in the contemporary world. Among such publications, one may mention The Great Fitna (or The Great Discord) first published in 1989 and which represents a seminal study and a revolutionary reading of Islamic history following the death of Prophet Muhammad. The Great Fitna is often described by scholars and critics as the most influential reference on the subject. Other works include Europe and Islam (1978), The Revelation, the Quran and the Prophecy (1986), The Crisis of Islamic Culture (2004) and a ground-breaking study entitled The Life of Muhammad first published in French between 2001 and 2007 and released in English in 2012. The three volumes of the latter study which cover the itinerary of the Prophet and the concomitant evolution of Islam are subtitled “Revelation and Prophecy,” “Predication in Mecca,” and “The Prophet’s Life in Medina and the Triumph of Islam.”