Friedrich Dieterici

Friedrich Heinrich Dieterici was born in Berlin on 6 July 1821. His father, Carl Friedrich Dieterici, was a statistician and economist in the Prussian administration. The son chose a different path: Oriental languages, and Arabic above all. He studied at Halle under Emil Rödiger, at Leipzig under Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, one of the masters of German Arabic studies, and in Berlin. His first work dealt with grammar and poetry: in 1847 he published a study of the poet al-Mutanabbi and his patron, the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawla.

Having qualified as a lecturer in Berlin in 1846, the young scholar set out for the East the following year. From November 1847 to the summer of 1849 he lived in Cairo, travelled up the Nile into Upper Egypt and Nubia, crossed Sinai and Arabia Petraea, then went on to Palestine, Damascus and Beirut. Out of this journey came a book, the Reisebilder aus dem Morgenlande (1853), in which the Arabist turns storyteller: street scenes, lessons with a sheikh, a cholera epidemic, a Bedouin caravan, the ruins of Petra.

In October 1850 he was appointed associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Berlin, where he would teach for the rest of his life. He produced an edition of the Alfiyya of Ibn Malik, the great didactic poem of Arabic grammar, with the commentary of Ibn Aqil, an Ottoman chrestomathy (1854), and then an edition of al-Mutanabbi's poems with the commentary of al-Wahidi. He also published an Arabic-German dictionary of the Qur'an.

The second half of his career turned to Arabic philosophy, then almost out of reach for European readers. Dieterici translated and commented on the epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa), a learned encyclopedia composed in the tenth century, in a long series of volumes gathered under the title Die Philosophie der Araber im X. Jahrhundert. He edited and translated treatises by al-Farabi and the "Theology of Aristotle", a Neoplatonic compilation wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher. He also took part in the debates of his time with an essay on Darwinism (1878), which he set alongside the Arab thinkers of the tenth century.

A member of the German Oriental Society, he was made honorary professor in 1901. He had married Amanda Badicke; of their four children, Konrad became a professor of physics and Walter headed the Berlin criminal police. Friedrich Dieterici died in Berlin on 18 August 1903, at the age of eighty-two.

His Reisebilder hold a place of their own in his work. It is the only one of his books in which the philologist speaks as a witness, with the confidence and prejudices of a mid-nineteenth-century Prussian Christian, but also with the curiosity of a man who read Arabic and could talk with the people he met.