In Memoriam

Wolfhart P. heinrichs
(1941-2014)*

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 227-229

On January 23, 2014, we lost a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. Wolfhart P. Heinrichs was born on October 
3, 1941, into a family of philologists. His 
father H. Matthias was a Germanist, and 
his mother Anne a scholar of Old Norse 
who attained a full professorship at the 
Freie Universität in Berlin at the age of 80. 

W o l f h a r t  b e g a n  h i s  s t u d i e s  i n  h i s 
hometown of Cologne. His university 
years included much traveling and many 
languages. After semesters spent at Bonn 
and Tübingen, he joined the School of 
Oriental and African Studies in London. 
He then studied at Frankfurt and finally at 

Giessen, where he received his doctorate 
in 1967. Along the way, he learned Latin, 
Greek, French, English, Hebrew, Arabic, 
P e r s i a n ,  S y r i a c ,  O l d  S o u t h  A r a b i a n , 
Ethiopic, Ottoman, and Uigur. He also 
studied certain other African languages—
which ones, specifically, I do not recall, 
though he is fondly remembered for 
reciting a text in one of them, complete 
with clicks, at parties. 

After stints in Beirut and Istanbul, and 
a first foray into Neo-Aramaic, Wolfhart 
returned to teach at Giessen. In 1977, he 
was offered a professorship in Arabic at 
Harvard University. Three years later, he 

*This obituary was originally published in the Journal of Abbasid Studies 1 (2014), 4-6.
 (Photo by Satoru Murata)



In Memoriam: Wolfhart P. Heinrichs

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 228

married Alma Giese, a fellow scholar of 
Arabic and Islam, and an accomplished 
translator into German. In 1996, he was 
appointed James Richard Jewett Professor 
of Arabic at Harvard, a position he held 
until his death. 

Most of Wolfhart’s work concerned 
Arabic literary theory and criticism. 
With enormous breadth and precision, 
he investigated questions such as the 
possible influence of Greek thought on 
Arabic poetics, the meaning of istiʿārah 
(metaphor), and the relationship between 
literary theory and legal hermeneutics. 
He was one of the few internationally 
recognized authorities on neo-Aramaic. 
And as co-editor of the Encyclopaedia 
of Islam, he not only reviewed countless 
entries written by others but contributed 
some fifty articles himself, beginning with 
“mubālaghah” and ending with “Zanjānī.” 
“He never promoted himself,” one of his 
former students recently wrote. “He just 
quietly and steadily produced, each item 
of scholarly output a gem contributing to a 
glittering tapestry of refreshingly oblique 
perspectives on things otherwise taken for 
granted or previously not considered.”

As a teacher and Doktorvater, Wolfhart 
was reluctant to suggest topics for his 
students, much less impose a particular 
method or approach. He was, however, 
uncompromising in his insistence that 
students think clearly, write carefully, 
and translate precisely. To ensure that 
these standards were met, he would 
comment copiously on whatever was 
submitted to him, often poking gentle fun 
at flights of fancy or (worse yet) errors 
in transliteration. I once amused him no 
end by mis-transliterating the name of 
the Abbasid caliph al-Mustaḍīʾ, “the one 
who seeks light,” as al-mustaḍīʿ, “the one 

who seeks ruination.” “Now that’s really 
funny,” I remember him scribbling in 
the margin. He may even have permitted 
himself an exclamation mark.

In retrospect, Wolfhart’s insistence on 
getting the details right seems to have 
arisen from a principle: that of respecting 
the complexity of the material we deal 
with. Since Edward Said, it has become 
c us t om ary  t o d is m is s  philologis t s  as 
“Orientalists,” that is, as not-so-harmless 
drudges intent on dominating the natives 
they study. It is hard to imagine Wolfhart 
aspiring to anything so grandiose. His 
method, if I might venture to distill it, 
consisted of the following premises. First, 
we must understand what problem it is 
that our text is trying to solve. Second, 
we must assume that the response makes 
sense. If it doesn’t make sense to us, then 
we must have misunderstood it. Wolfhart 
e x t e n d e d  t h i s  s o - c a l l e d  p r i n c i p l e  o f 
charity to everything he read, including 
our comically wrongheaded translations. 
I don’t recall hearing him say that our 
translations were wrong. Instead, he would 
ask: “If you wanted to say that in Arabic, 
how would you say it?” This is a question I 
still ask my own students. 

A t  h i s  m e m o r i a l  s e r v i c e ,  h e l d  i n 
Cambridge, MA, on January 27, 2014, 
those of us who knew him primarily as 
a scholar and teacher were touched to 
hear neighbors and friends outside the 
university speak of his kindness, his good 
humor, and his love of life. “He never made 
anyone feel a lesser person for not knowing 
all the things he knew,” was a refrain we 
heard again and again. In retrospect it 
seems that he thought of his work not only 
as a calling but also as a job, in the good 
healthy sense of the word. I remember him 
telling me, with a hint of pride perhaps, 



In Memoriam: Wolfhart P. Heinrichs

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 229

that the briefcase he carried was actually 
a satchel of the kind carried by German 
working men.

A longer biography, a bibliography 
of his works and Alma’s, and a list of his 
students all appear in his Festschrift, 
Classical Arabic Humanities In Their 
Own Terms, edited by Beatrice Gruendler 
( B r i l l ,  2 0 0 8 ) .  M e a n w h i l e ,  t r i b u t e s  t o 
him continue to appear. A particularly 
apt one was posted on Facebook some 
weeks ago by one of his former students. 

It consists of a poem by Abū al-Ḥusayn 
ibn Fāris that, according to Wolfhart, 
“encapsulated the life of a scholar”:  
 
“How are you?” they asked.  
“All is well,” I replied:
 
“One need met, others unfulfilled.” 

When the heart’s sorrows accumulate, we say:
 
“Perhaps one day there shall be release.”
 
My cat is my companion, my heart’s delight 
My papers; and my beloved, the lamp.

 — Michael Cooperson