A History of the Arab Peoples (eBook)

Updated Edition

Albert Hourani (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
640 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-30249-9 (ISBN)

Infos

In a bestselling work of profound and lasting importance, the late Albert Hourani told the definitive history of the Arab peoples from the seventh century, when the new religion of Islam began to spread from the Arabian peninsula westwards, to the present day. It is a masterly distillation of a lifetime of scholarship and a unique insight into a perpetually troubled region. This updated edition by Malise Ruthven adds a substantial new chapter which includes recent events such as 9/11, the US invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath, the fall of the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and the incipient civil war in Syria, bringing Hourani's magisterial History up to date. Ruthven suggests that while Hourani can hardly have been expected to predict in detail the massive upheavals that have shaken the Arab world recently he would not have been entirely surprised, given the persistence of the kin-patronage networks he describes in his book and the challenges now posed to them by a new media-aware generation of dissatisfied youth. In a new biographical preface, Malise Ruthven shows how Hourani's perspectives on Arab history were shaped by his unique background as an English-born Arab Christian with roots in the Levant.

Albert Hourani was elected a Fellow of Magdalen and appointed Lecturer (later Reader) in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford in 1948. From 1958 until 1971 he was Director of the Middle East Centre. He died in 1993.

Autor

lt;p>Albert Hourani was Director of the Middle East Centre. He died in 1993.

Malise Ruthven is the author, of Islam in the World and Islam: A Very Short Introduction.

Textauszug

Preface (2012)

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 woollen 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:

They gave me my first experience of Mediterranean sunlight, after the half-light of the north of England. It was important to get to know my extended family, or rather my two families, those of my father and of my mother. I learned something about myself, and also about the nature of family ties in the Mediterranean world: the ways in which ties of blood or connection could give a depth and solidity to all kinds of human relationship, and the values of honour and shame about which social anthropologists were to write so much later.3

Two important figures who impressed him at the AUB were Charles Malik (later to become Lebanon’s foreign minister and one of the founding voices of the United Nations, who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and Qustantyn Zurayk, a lecturer in Islamic History and an inspiration to the younger Arab nationalists. By now Hourani had acquired enough Arabic to follow Zurayk’s ‘eloquent and judicious course on Islamic history’ which he modestly described as being ‘the nearest approach I ever had to any formal training in the subject’. Hourani’s interest in Arab nationalism was roused by readings of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and George Antonius’s Arab Awakening. He absorbed many of the insights contained in these seminal and influential books. However he would come to question Lawrence’s view of the Arab movement as ‘too simplistically heroic’ and he found himself challenging many of Antonius’s assertions about the primordial character of Arab identity. Both writers, he felt, had ideas about the Arab nation that neglected or undervalued the centuries of Ottoman rule.

During the Second World War Hourani worked as an analyst in the British Foreign Office’s Research Department, headed by the historian Arnold Toynbee. He shared many of Toynbee’s views about the Middle East and the betrayal of the promises Britain had made to the Arabs during the First World War. His superior in the Middle East section was Hamilton Gibb, whom Hourani would eventually succeed at the new Centre for Middle Eastern Studies established by Gibb after the war at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He found Gibb’s style of detached, scholarly writing especially appealing. Hourani’s wartime and post-war duties gave him direct experience of diplomacy in fraught and difficult times. In 1942 he was sent to the Middle East on a mission of inquiry, and on the basis of a report he had written was offered a position in the office of the British Minister in Cairo where he remained until 1945. He met some of the leading personalities of the day, including Glubb Pasha, the British officer who built up and commanded the beduin Arab Legion in Transjordan, and David Ben Gurion, the Zionist leader who would become Israel’s first Prime Minister, with whom he had a ‘long and pleasant’ conversation. In due course the reports he wrote for the Foreign Office became the first drafts of published books: Syria and Lebanon (1946), Great Britain and the Arab World (1946) and Minorities in the Arab World (1947).

Towards the end of the war Hourani and his colleagues became increasingly preoccupied by the situation in Palestine and the problem it posed for Britain as the mandatory power facing the conflicting pressures of Jewish immigration and Arab resistance. Inevitably his sympathies lay with the Palestinian Arabs who feared dispossession and loss of their lands as the Zionist movement gained increasing momentum with the revelations of the Nazi horrors emerging from Eastern Europe. In 1945 he met Musa ‘Alami, ‘the most intelligent and interesting of the Palestinian Arab leaders’ and who persuaded him to join the Arab Office in Jerusalem, an organization aimed at countering Zionist propaganda by explaining the Arab case. For the first and only time in his career he was employed as a propagandist. Although Zionist lobbyists regarded him as their most formidable opponent, Hourani disliked his role. Looking back on this phase of his life he would write:

I did not like this kind of work, however, and I do not think I was good at it. I did...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.1.2013
• Einführung: Malise Ruthven
• Nachwort: Malise Ruthven
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Islam
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
• Schlagworte: civilisations • Crusades • Egypt • Islam • Islamic State • Middle East • Syria
• ISBN-10: 0-571-30249-1 / 0571302491
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-30249-9 / 9780571302499