First published in 1937. Hitti spent 10 years writing this book. Although its editor originally hesitated to publish even a hundred copies of this book, the book has gone through ten published editions since then.

In his History of the Arabs, Philip Hitti denies the idea of an Arab army destroyed by Charles Martel, stressing that the caliph had just died and that these Arabs preferred Spain to more northerly areas. For him, it is not the defeat of the Arabs which enabled the possibility of the Occident, as if the Arabs had to be defeated so that the Occident could exist.[citation needed] Instead, it is the transmission of the knowledge of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, and thus the dialogue between the two banks of the Mediterranean, which leads to the foundation of the Occident.

Philip Khuri Hitti (فيليب خوري حتي), (Shimlan 1886 - Princeton 1978) was a Lebanese American scholar, and authority on Arab and Middle Eastern history, Islam, and Semitic languages.

His works include:

The Syrians in America (1924)

The origins of the Druze people and religion: with extracts from their sacred writings (1928)

An Arab-Syrian Gentlemen in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munqidh (1929)

History of the Arabs (1937)

The Arabs: a short history (1943)

History of Syria including Lebanon and Palestine (1951)[5]

Syria: A Short History (1959), the condensed version of the 1951 'History of Syria including Lebanon and Palestine'

The Near East in History (1961)

Islam and the West (1962)

Lebanon in History (1957)

Makers of Arab History (1968)

Islam: A Way of Life (1970)

Capital cities of Arab Islam (1973)