THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'Our religion and our empire are Arab and twins, the one protected by the power of God, the other by the Lord of Heaven'

At the dawn of the 7th century, as the two world dominating empires of Byzantium and Sasanid Persia began to crumble and decay, a prophet in a remote desert town began to preach a compelling message of moral reform and submission to the will of God. Propelled by the teachings of Muhammad, the Arab tribes united in a career of conquest which spread the rule of Islam from Spain and North Africa in the west to Pakistan in the east and established a new empire that lasted for 800 years. Under its auspices, the Arab peoples created a unified civilisation unrivalled in its wealth and sophistication.

Mighty cities, ornamented with resplendent mosques and luxurious palaces, rose to prominence - none greater than Cairo, the ‘metropolis of the world, garden of the universe, meeting-place of nations’ - while Arab scientists led the world in the study of mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

In his acclaimed A History of the Arab Peoples, originally published in 1991, the eminent historian Albert Hourani distils a lifetime of learning into a remarkable portrait not only of the golden centuries of Arabic pre-eminence but also of the slow period of decline under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and the European powers that succeeded it. He charts with exemplary objectivity the 20th-century legacy of burgeoning Arab nationalism, the establishment of influential nation states, and the rise of revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism.

This edition is complemented by a newly commissioned afterword by Malise Ruthven, historian and expert on Islam, and features glorious illustrations of jewel-like illuminations, exquisite metalwork and architectural treasures.

The Rich History of Arab Civilisation

JOHN KEAY

A History of the Arab Peoples, first published in 1991, has been described as Albert Hourani’s magnum opus and a fitting summation of his life’s work. He died a few months later; and it was certainly the most successful and marginally the most substantial of his books. But an intellectual odyssey that spanned nearly six decades is not easily represented in a single work; nor do I think that that was his intention. From active participation in the Arab cause in the 1940s Hourani had retired into academic life while still in his thirties and would afterwards be drawn into the polemics of the day only with reluctance and extreme circumspection. ‘I am not a commentator,’ he kept telling his would-be biographer when taxed with breaking news from the Middle East.

Over the years his intellectual interests also changed; so did his conclusions. A History of the Arab Peoples, while it draws on a lifetime’s engagement by the most universally respected scholar in his field, is no retrospective of his own work, more a point of departure for others. History-writing he saw as an ongoing act of collective consciousness – of ‘a community taking stock of its own past and of what has made it what it is, [and] creating its own principles of emphasis and categories of explanation’. Naturally the task changed with a people’s perception of itself, leading to constant revision of both principles and categories. An inspirational mentor as well as a scholar of painful honesty Hourani paraded his own inconsistencies by way of encouragement to his pupils.

I was not one of them and we never met. But our paths almost crossed on a couple of occasions. The first was at Oxford. He too had once been a demy (scholar) at Magdalen College, and after his unhappy taste of activism in the Middle East in the late 1940s, had returned there as a research fellow. But by the time I arrived in 1960, he had removed to St Antony’s as director of the new Middle East Centre. He was married and lived in the Woodstock Road where his garden abutted a vacant lot with a shed that was believed to be that in which the young T. E. Lawrence had once nursed his boyish fantasies. Hourani thought well of Lawrence. He respected his insights into desert society and admired the dramatic imagery of his prose. Though neither of these did he attempt in any way to emulate, he acknowledged Seven Pillars of Wisdom as one of the two books that had first excited his interest in the Arab cause.

The other was The Arab Awakening by George Antonius, an enormously influential work that traced the genesis of modern Arab nationalism back to its roots in Ottoman Syria and became something of an Arab manifesto. It was published in 1938 just when Hourani him-self, having abandoned his doctoral dissertation at Oxford, had arrived in Lebanon to teach at the American University of Beirut. The two men became close associates. Like Hourani, Antonius was from a family of Lebanese Christians whose business interests had taken them far afield. The Houranis had decamped to Manchester, from where Albert had progressed to Mill Hill and Oxford, the Antoniuses to Alexandria, whence George had gone to England for further study and then served in the British administration in Palestine. The Arab Awakening projected George Antonius into the forefront of events as a spokesman for the Arab cause; and when he died prematurely in 1942, his widow groomed Hourani for his mantle as the most acceptable (to the British) face of Arab nationalism.

After service in London and Cairo during the Second World War, Hourani was thus well equipped to take up the Palestinian cause. He ran the Jerusalem branch of the Arab Office, published his first three books, and wrote numerous papers designed to counteract Zionist propaganda. In 1946 he testified before the Anglo–American Committee of Enquiry into the future of Palestine. Palestine now topped the post-war agenda with not even the protracted fate of British India commanding greater international attention. Still subject to British rule under a League of Nations mandate and still overwhelmingly populated by Arabs, the lands west of the Jordan were suddenly in much greater demand as ‘a homeland for the Jewish people’. The horrors of the Holocaust were emerging; Jews displaced by the war clamoured for resettlement.

By some calculations the Anglo–American Committee was the eighteenth enquiry into the Palestine situation and by no means the most conclusive. Hourani addressed it with a candour and logic that left a deep impression. Committee members found him as seductive as another Mancunian charmer, the seventy-something Chaim Weizmann who testified on behalf of the Zionists, and as compelling as Albert Einstein, who had told the Committee its hearings were an exercise in time-wasting. Both Weizmann and Hourani could be very persuasive; but Einstein was right. Other than admitting another one hundred thousand Jewish immigrants into Palestine, the Anglo–American Committee plumped for the status quo. Two years later the British pulled out, the state of Israel was declared and the first Arab–Israeli war broke out. Bitterly disillusioned, Hourani returned to Oxford and to Magdalen.

He was disillusioned by political work because it meant the constant reiteration of dogmatic statements shorn of all nuances of meaning. And he was handicapped by a legacy, partly attributable to Antonius, that submerged the issue of Palestine within the dialectics of pan-Arab nationalism. If the Arabs were a nation, and if political integration was their ultimate goal, where did this leave the national aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs? Were there, in effect, many Arab peoples or only one? Was a shared language (Arabic), a shared religio–cultural tradition (overwhelmingly Islamic) and a similarity of historical experience sufficient basis for a modern political identity? What indeed was nationalism? And must it necessarily conform to Western notions of a united people living within a well-defined territory under a chosen form of government?

In the 1950s and 1960s Nasser provided pan-Arabism with new purpose and rhetoric. United Arab Republics featuring Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya briefly flared; the Palestine issue continued to serve as a focus for Arab solidarity. But in 1977 Sadat undertook his sensational dash to Jerusalem and offered Israel peace and recognition in return for territories, principally Sinai, that had been occupied during the 1973 war. Egypt, the most populous and powerful of the Arab states, had unilaterally defected. Pan-Arabism lay in tatters.

It was against this background that I almost met Hourani again. In1980 Channel 4 had commissioned – and the Kuwaitis were funding – a major ten-part documentary series entitled ‘The Arabs: A Living History’. Hourani, who was by now a retired scholar of great distinction, was serving as the principal consultant; and for no particular reason I was asked to write the book of the series. This involved representing the views not only of the editorial team and of Hourani himself, from whom there came recordings and transcripts, but also the sometimes more controversial opinions of the Arab academics who were to present each programme. Anticipating problems – like how to distance myself from views I might not share and could not possibly have researched – I secured an option to keep my name off the book. I eventually exercised it; Basim Musallam, the main presenter and impresario of the series, assumed sole authorship. But re-reading the book now, what strikes me is the extent to which pan-Arabism still featured in the thinking of Arab intellectuals in the 1980s and the drastic revisionism that its failure was generating.

In ‘an intellectual biography’ of Albert Hourani (A Vision of the Middle East, 1999) Abdulaziz al-Sudairi says that Hourani’s work on the television series helped him map out the parameters of his last great work. This was A History of the Arab Peoples; and when I first came across it, it did seem strangely familiar. There were moments when I could almost ‘hear’ Hourani writing it. But significant changes were also evident. In the television book, the phrase ‘the Arab world’ had been prefered to ‘the Arab people’ of pre-Sadat discourse; now both had been supplanted by ‘the Arab peoples’. The ambiguity of the term ‘Arab’ was freely conceded; and notably absent from the book’s bibliography was The Arab Awakening of George Anto nius, a key text for the television series. Antonius himself, the founding father of modern Arab nationalism, received no mention either.

The History’s first two hundred pages comprise a magisterial overview of the origins of the Arabs, the genesis and nature of Islam, and the great civilisation to which they both gave birth. There is very little about dynasts or conquests. Hourani was more interested in society, in groups, classes and elites, and in the ties that bound each together. He often cites Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century scholar and historian, who had explained such linkages across professional, sectarian and economic boundaries with a term (‘asabiyya) meaning ‘a corporate spirit oriented towards obtaining and keeping power’. This sense of purposeful belonging could be traced throughout Arab history; and since power rapidly corrupted those who attained it, the term might help explain the early fragmentation of the medieval Arab empire and, by extension, the implosion of recent pan-Arab nationalism. This seems to me typical of the book’s ground-breaking insights, typical of a great scholar of ideas. Rather than simply endorsing his life’s work, A History of the Arab Peoples upholds Hourani’s maxim about seeking out those new insights by which a community can take stock of ‘what has made it what it is’.