ABSTRACT
Gustave von Grunebaum, humanist and eminent Islamicist, was born in Vienna on 1 September 1909 and died in Los Angeles on 27 February 1972. These dates tell us much about von Grunebaum’s development as a human being and scholar. A student of Islam, he started out in a great scholarly tradition and gave it new directions. His father, Egon Ritter von Grünebaum, as well as his paternal grandfather, whose first name was passed on to him, was prominent in the Austrian railway system; his mother, Edith Weissel, also had strong roots in Austria. He was thus born into a family firmly established in the Austrian social and intellectual life that flourished in the nineteenth century until the upheavals caused by World War I.
