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Since Thursday, 11 June 2015, the pen of Germany's most prolific modern Middle East historian rests. Thomas Philipp's scholarly work will live on and inspire new generations of historians of Syria and Arab intellectual history. Although we will miss his humanity and personality, we will carry both within us. We have known for years that Thomas was battling cancer. And yet, when the tragic news of his passing emerged out of Erlangen that Friday, it hit me like a lightening bolt: it could not be; thoughts of denial rushed through my head. Had I not spoken to him just the other day? It felt like it. I checked my inbox: our last correspondence--March . . . three months had passed! And no mention of health concerns. We must have been too busy whipping into shape his two chapters for an edited volume on Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
None of us ever seriously entertained the thought of modern Middle East scholarship bereft of Thomas Philipp's presence. To be sure, Thomas was older and wiser than us. The trademark ascot tie he sported firmly placed him at the height of fashion between 1965 and 1975. And his habit of carrying his Swiss Army knife everywhere he went, and using it whenever half an opportunity arose, was endearingly quaint. But he was of our age, he shared our sense of humor--in fact, he battled the international stigma that Germans have no sense of humor. Thomas was one of us because he shared our worries about US foreign policy and deteriorating politics in the Middle East. He also made us feel that we were part of his world in great measure because he eschewed the formal hierarchies that so stifle the German scholarly community.
I had two epiphanies in the minutes and hours after hearing the devastating message about Thomas' passing. The first was that all of my own scholarly interests turned out to be extensions of Thomas' research interests: the discussion of Beirut's late Ottoman history in my dissertation was in large measure a sequel to his groundbreaking Acre book. My interest in the 19th-century nahda was a field that his own dissertation had shaped and that was...