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Ihsan Abbas

Ihsan Abbas

(1920–2003), Palestinian literary critic, historian, philologist, editor, and translator specializing in classical and modern Arabic literature, Arabic literary criticism, and the editing of classical Arabic texts. He was a professor of Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut and previously taught at the University of Khartoum; he also served as a visiting professor at Princeton University. His numerous honors included the King Faisal International Prize (1980), the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation (1983), the Sultan Al Owais Award (1990–91), and the al-Furqan Foundation Award for Islamic Heritage (2002), as well as distinguished medals from Lebanon and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He authored more than twenty-five books, edited over fifty classical Arabic works, and is widely regarded as one of the foremost Arab scholars of the twentieth century.