Irfan Shahîd

Shahîd was born in Nazareth, Mandatory Palestine, to a family of Palestinian Christians. He left in 1946 to attend St John's College, Oxford, where he studied classics and Greco-Roman history under the renowned British historian A. N. Sherwin-White.^[2]

He received his PhD from Princeton University in Arabic and Islamic Studies. His doctorate thesis was "Early Islam and Poetry" and his research was primarily focused on three major areas: the area where the Greco-Roman world, especially the Byzantine Empire, meets the Arabic and Islamic worlds in the late antique and medieval times; Islamic studies, particularly the Quran; and Arabic literature, especially classical and medieval Arabic poetry.^[5]

• Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs, 1984

• Byzantium and the Arabs in The Fourth Century, 1984

• Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century, 1989

• Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Volume 1, part 1, 1995
• Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Volume 1, part 2, 1995

• Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Volume 2, Part 1, 2002
• Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Volume 2, Part 2, 2010

• Byzantium and the Semitic Orient Before the Rise of Islam (Collected Studies Series: No.Cs270), 1988

• Omar Khayyám, the Philosopher-Poet of Medieval Islam, 1982
• Shahîd, Irfan (1971). The Martyrs of Najran - New Documents. Bruxelles, Belgium: Société des Bollandistes.