Page 17 - كتاب تأبين حسنين ربيع

As an outstanding undergraduate and M.A. student at Cairo University
in medieval Islamic history, Hassanein was awarded a scholarship in 1964
to undertake his Ph.D. at SOAS, London University, under the direction of
Bernard Lewis, then the doyen of specialists on medieval Islamic history.
Completing his degree in 1969 after serving as a lecturer in medieval
Islamic history at SOAS, Hassanein joined the Department of History,
which was his official academic home for the rest of his life.

As a scholar Hassanein was most active during the following decades.
He published his dissertation as The Financial System of Egypt (AH. 564-
741/ A.D. 1169-1341) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), which is
still sited today in studies of Ayyubid and early Mamluk history, a well-
deserved, long shelf life for any scholarly work. As Hassanein shared with
me, his research priority then shifted to editing medieval Arabic texts as he
felt that properly trained Egyptian scholars had the Arabic and the
methodological skills to do this time consuming, extremely important work.
He edited and annotated Ibn Wasil’s Mufarrij Al-Kurūb fї Akhbar Bani
Ayyūb (History of the Ayyubids) as well as oversaw the work of others.

Hassanein quickly established a reputation as a demanding, but
effective teacher at Cairo University and to give his students a broader
knowledge of the medieval Mediterranean world, he offered courses on
Byzantine history. Discovering that there was very little for them to read in
Arabic on that topic, he wrote “Studies in the history of the Byzantine
State,” which went through six editions from 1983 to 1998. What his
colleagues also discovered was that Hassanein was an extremely effective
administrator and it was no surprise that he became Chair of his Cairo
University department, but what no one could have predicted was that he
moved on become a Vice Dean, College of Arts, then Dean, and finally a
Cairo University Vice President from 1993 to 1998 as well as Director of
Cairo University’s Open Education Center which focused on distance
learning. Even after his mandatory retirement Hassanein maintained an
active interest in distance learning for Egyptians.

For over four decades Hassanein served as an advisor to the American
Research Center in Egypt where his primary responsibility involved
reviewing the applications of Americans who applied for ARCE fellowships
to work on Islamic or Coptic topics. He was particularly sensitive to the

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