A History of the Arab Peoples

"Yes. Though, actually, Hourani begins with a person too: Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab father of sociology, the 14th-century Arab intellectual. Khaldun wrote a very serious history about the rise and fall of empires which saw the driving energy of Arab history as coming from the desert. The power of the tribes from the desert conquers the towns and establishes itself as dominant power, and then, in the course of generations, loses its martial ardour, and becomes shaped by the refinement and culture of city life. So in the end it is no longer strong enough to defend itself against the next wave of ardour coming from the desert that will challenge the political order in the now effete city and impose a new political order. He sees the rise and fall of empires in Arab classical history as in a sense shaped by this cyclical pattern. He also sees the loyalties of Arabs being shaped by a force called asabiya . This is the notion that your loyalties belong to those you know best. So it’ll be me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, us and our cousin against the next family over, us and our neighbours against the next town over, us and our villages against those in another province – this notion of social cohesion that grows more diffuse the larger the unit. Khaldun sees asabiya as being one of the driving forces of Arab history. And Hourani picked up on Khaldun’s cyclical notion of the rise and fall of Arab empires, and these almost Weberian notions of loyalty, as the key themes with which to weave a history of the Arab peoples – critically he speaks in the plural. He sees the Arabs as being many peoples and one people at the same time, and his history traces the Arab world from the rise of Islam to modern times, and does so with an elegant conciseness that allows him to cover that huge sweep of 14 centuries in about 500-600 pages. Hourani is in many ways the most respected modern historian of the Arab world. He made his career here in Oxford – he was the founding father of the Middle East centre where I work – and when I met him as a graduate student, the awe and reverence with which I approached the great man was, I’m sure, pretty funny to him. But he was a delightful man. When I came to take my appointment to Oxford in 1991 I had two years of seeing him before he died. I keep being described as disciple of Hourani, or a student of Hourani, and I was neither of those things. I never got a chance to study under Albert, though I would have loved to. But I always wanted to write a book like Albert Hourani did. I always felt very much in awe of his scholarship and his depth of knowledge and erudition. And, in a sense, all of those great qualities were brought to bear in his last great work, A History of the Arab Peoples ."

"One of the key reasons is in the title. It is called the peoples not people, which I thought was very interesting. Hourani redefined how people look at the history of that part of the world. Typically, throughout the late 19th and early 20th century the history of the Arab peoples was told either in terms of religion, mainly by recounting the story of Islam since the time of the Prophet Mohammed and until the fall of the Ottomans, or from the perspective of state development. For example, how the Egyptian state emerged. What Hourani did was something very different. He emphasised that all these points are secondary to the most important one, which is the culture that unites the different people who live in this large piece of land. And he paid specific attention to the language: he saw it as a key denominator between the people who live in the space from Morocco to Bahrain. He focused on the development of the language and the culture as a whole. He traced the history of those people through their contributions to the culture that came to emerge over the past 14 centuries. There is lots of Islamic history and politics in Hourani’s book. But the key illuminating point is on how the culture that has emerged has gathered those people and really united them by a common thread. The second point, which I thought was very interesting, was how he focused on Arabism as an identity, rather than on the flow of the different Islamic empires. We sometimes forget that the Christian Arabs constituted at one point more than 20 per cent of the people in that part of the world. And their contribution was immense. It’s also crucial to remember that the idea of Arabism pre-dates Islam. And what Hourani has done is to take the idea of Arabism and to link it with his focus on culture and basically put that mix as the framework through which you can understand the history of the people who live there. The book covers more than 1,300 years of history, so to do that without losing the focus on your thesis I thought was a great contribution. This is a very interesting point because if you look at the last 200 years, especially in places such as Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, Arab Christians were at the forefront of social development in these countries. Arab Christians were key participants in the development of Arab liberalism at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. They played a big part in the development of education, journalism, and art, (whether cinema, theatre, literature, etc). But then the Arab liberal experiment was abruptly ended by the emergence of Arab nationalism. Gradually, the liberal values faded and were replaced by an antagonistic and sometimes pugnacious form of nationalism. And in the few decades that followed, political Islam started to gain significant ground across the Arab world. I discuss in my book in detail why these developments subtly but steadily eroded Christians’ involvement in their society. The interesting thing is that Arab nationalists, mainly Nasser, were very sensitive to the concerns of Egyptian and Levantine Christians but there was no escaping the fact that by promoting Arab nationalism you are throwing Egypt, for example, into the core of the Arabian hinterland, which for the past 14 centuries was ruled by Islam. And with the rise of Islamism throughout the 1970s and 1980s across the whole of the Arab world, Islam as an identity started to gain ground. And that is why in the last 30 or 35 years we have seen the steady dilution of the role of Christians in Egyptian society. We have seen seclusion and massive Christian emigration out of Egypt (and also out of Lebanon and recently out of Iraq). But I am optimistic because the 2011 revolution that we have seen was secular in nature and national in rhetoric – at least in the initial stage. This secularism and focus on nationalism, rather than sectarianism and any religious discourse, have created momentum for the liberal movement in Egypt. And that hopefully will revitalise the Christian role in the country."