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A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani

A HISTORY OF THE ARAB PEOPLES

Book Preface

The subject of this book is the history of the Arabic- speaking parts of the Islamic world, from the rise of Islam until the present day.

During some periods, however, I have had to go beyond the subject: for example, when I consider the early history of the caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and the expansion of European trade and empire.

 It would be possible to argue that the subject is too large or too small: that the history of the Maghrib is different from that of the Middle East, or that the history of the countries where Arabic is the main language cannot be seen in isolation from that of other Muslim countries.

A line has to be drawn somewhere, however, and this is where I have chosen to draw it, partly because of the limits of my own knowledge.

I hope the book will show that there is sufficient unity of historical experience between the different regions it covers to make it possible to think and write about them in a single framework.

The book is intended for students who are beginning to study the subject and for general readers who wish to learn something about it. It will be clear to specialists that, in a book with so large a scope, much of what I say is based upon the research of others.

I have tried to give the essential facts and to interpret them in the light of what others have written. Some of my debts to their work are indicated in the bibliography.

Writing a book that covers such a long period, I have had to make decisions about names. I have used the names of modern countries to indicate geographical regions, even when those names were not used in the past; it seemed simpler to use the same names throughout the book, rather

than change them from period to period. Thus ‘Algeria’ is used for a certain region in North Africa, even though the name came into use only in modern centuries.

In general, I have used names that will be familiar to those who read mainly in English; the word ‘Maghrib’ is probably familiar enough to be used rather than ‘North-west Africa’, but ‘Mashriq’ is not and so I have used ‘Middle East’ instead.

I have called the Muslim parts of the Iberian peninsula Andalus because it is simpler to use one word than a phrase.

When I use a name which is now that of a sovereign state in writing about a period before that state came into existence, I employ it to refer to a certain region roughly defined; it is only when I write of the modern period that I intend it to refer to the area included within the frontiers of the state.

For example, throughout most of the book ‘Syria’ refers to a certain region that has common features, both physical and social, and on the whole, has had a single historical experience, but I use it only to refer to the state of Syria once it has come into existence after the First World War.

I need scarcely say that such uses do not imply any political judgment about which states should exist and where their frontiers lie.

The main geographical names used are shown in Map 1. When Albert Hourani died in 1993 he left a substantial body of work with more than a hundred essays and several path-breaking books culminating in this History of the Arab Peoples.1

A scholar of unrelenting productivity, he had trained and inspired a generation of students through his academic writings and by the selflessness and care with which he guided their research.

 A gentle and modest man, he seemed to epitomize the qualities that are sought, but not always found, in the university teacher: a passion for his subject, a relentlessly enquiring mind, always open to new ideas, elegance in argument, politeness in debate.

I never had the privilege of being one of his graduate students, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers on both sides of the Atlantic.

But I had the pleasure of knowing him towards the end of his tenure at Oxford and during his retirement in London.

My publisher had sent him the typescript of Islam in the World, a book I had written while working as a journalist with the BBC in London.

Dispensing with the convention of the anonymous reader’s report, he called me personally. I can still remember my joy on receiving that phone call: ‘I like your book: would you like to come down to Oxford to go through it with me?’

In several sessions, my manuscript received the kind of expert probing normally reserved for the dissertations of his graduate students. Albert did not merely check the book for inaccuracies.

He wanted it to succeed on its own terms, by gently plugging the inevitable gaps in my reading. One of his less friendly critics likened him to the pasha of Middle East studies who presided over a network of patron-client relationships of the kind

described in his writings on Ottoman-Arab society. A more appropriate analogy would be that of the Sufi shaykh or master, who seeks to guide his young murids (followers) towards greater truth and understanding.

Albert Hourani was born in Manchester in 1915, the fifth of six children in a family of cotton merchants from Marjayoun in what is now Lebanon. His grandfather had converted to Protestantism from the Greek Orthodox Church.

His father Fadlo had been educated at the Syrian Protestant College before moving to Manchester in 1881 to work in the cotton export business.

Cotton and woolen goods from Manchester were found throughout the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, while the city was home to communities of mostly Levantine immigrants – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – who established businesses there.

The Hourani household contained a rich blend of Anglo- Levantine cultures. As Albert’s brother Cecil would write in his memoir:

… to my earliest memories in Manchester there were two faces: the one Near Eastern, Lebanese, full of poetry, politics, and business; the other partly Scottish Presbyterian, full of Sunday church-going and Sunday school, partly English through an English nanny and a succession of English and Irish cooks and maids.

Nothing epitomized this dichotomy more than the diet on which we were raised: on Saturdays when my father lunched at home with his Lebanese and Syrian fellow businessmen and clients from abroad, we ate the food of the Lebanese villages – kibbe, and the traditional dish of Saturday, mujaddara or Esau’s pottage; on Sundays there was an English roast, followed by apple pie or milk pudding.²

Fadlo Hourani was a keen member of the Liberal Party and Manchester’s social clubs. In 1946 – well into his eighties – he became the Honorary Consul for Lebanon in Northern England, a position that gave him official standing in the city where he spent most of his life.

Earlier in his career, he had suffered from ethnic discrimination: when he tried to place Albert and his elder brother George in one of Manchester’s best private schools he was told that ‘only

English boys’ were accepted. He responded by founding a school of his own – the Didsbury Preparatory School – which, though small, had a mixed intake of Levantine, English, and Sephardic Jewish pupils.

At 14 Albert was sent to Mill Hill School near London, the first ‘public’ (fee-paying) boarding school that was not a Church of England foundation. Founded by Nonconformists in 1807, Mill Hill fostered a culture of tolerance and individual freedom.

 Hourani was a happy and diligent student. Mill Hill would leave a lasting imprint on his mind and sensibility.

In 1933 Hourani went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read ‘PPE’ (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics).

The course gave him a solid grounding in English and European liberal thought from Locke and Mill to Descartes and Kant. It also stimulated his interest in the history of ideas.

In his final year, however, he became more absorbed in history, and particularly the history of the Middle East.

 His interest had been stimulated from holiday visits to Marjayoun and through his father’s friendship with Philip Hitti, the doyen of Arab historians working in the West.

He started working for a Ph.D. in Middle East History at Oxford (where little teaching in the subject was available), but soon abandoned the project.

Instead he spent his grant money on travelling to Beirut, where he obtained a job as a lecturer at his father’s old college, now renamed the American University of Beirut (AUB).

Many years later he explained how his years in Beirut would exercise a decisive influence on his intellectual outlook: