Francis Edward Peters, SJ (June 23, 1927 – April 30, 2020),[1] was an American academic. He served as professor emeritus of history, religion and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University (NYU).
He taught for two years from 1952 to 1954 at Canisius High School in Buffalo, N.Y., and was released from his Jesuit vows in 1954.[2] He earned a degree in Russian language studies from Fordham University in 1956 and completed his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at Princeton University in 1961. He taught at NYU from 1961 to 2008. Trained in both Islamic studies and in classical Greek and Roman studies, he considered himself a scholar of religion, particularly the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
At NYU he served as chairperson of both the Classics and the Middle Eastern Studies departments. He was a visiting professor at a number of other institutions, including several in the Middle East as well as the General Theological Seminary in New York City.
Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press (1967)
Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam, New York University Press (1968)
Aristoteles Arabus. The Oriental Translations and Commentaries of the Aristotelian Corpus, E. J. Brill, Leiden (1968)
Harvest of Hellenism: A History of the Near East from Alexander the Great to the Triumph of Christianity, Simon and Schuster, New York, ISBN0-671-20658-3 (1971)
Allah's Commonwealth: A History of Islam in the Near East, 600–1100 A.D., Simon and Schuster, New York, ISBN0-671-21564-7 (1973)
Jerusalem: Holy City/Holy Places, New York University, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York (1983)
Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times, Princeton University Press, ISBN0-691-07300-7 (1985)
Distant Shrine: The Islamic Centuries in Jerusalem, AMS Press, New York, ISBN0-404-61629-1 (1993)
Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places, Princeton University Press, ISBN0-691-02120-1 (1994)
Jerusalem and Mecca: The Typology of the Holy City in the Near East, New York University Press, ISBN0-8147-6598-X (1986)
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation, Princeton University Press