Albert Hourani, the eminent Oxford professor, is one of a very few scholars who can authoritatively paint a canvas that stretches in space from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, in time from the Prophet Muhammad to the recently concluded Iraq-Iran war, and in theme from politics to culture. His graceful way with words and his talent for getting to the heart of an issue make his survey a pleasure to read.
But the evident virtues of A History of the Arab Peoples notwithstanding, close scrutiny of the book reveals some major deficiencies, having to do with its static quality, its tendency to gloss over problems, and its hidden agenda.
To begin with, Mr. Hourani's narrative lacks a sense of history. He offers no thoughts on the evolving role of the Arabic language; on the place of Islam in public life; or on the place of Arabic-speakers in the world. Any given paragraph may sparkle, but the book as a whole lacks a feel for change over time.
The closest approximation to an abstract thought comes in the preface, where Mr. Hourani writes of his intent to show that there is "sufficient unity of historical experience between the different regions [this book] covers to make it possible to think and write about them in a single framework." But Mr. Hourani promptly leaves this issue and never again returns to it. Instead, we are inundated with a barrage of facts, facts, and more facts. In some ways, Mr. Hourani's work more closely resembles an Arab chronicle than a modern Western history.
A more severe problem concerns the book's overly-rosy picture. Unpleasantries such as racism, the status of women, and the Arab record in Africa are either touched on lightly or sugar-coated. In a typical passage, Mr. Hourani renders a strangely favorable picture of slaves' conditions in premodern Islam. It is worth of quoting at length:
They did not possess the full legal rights of free men, but the shari'a [Islamic law] laid down that they should be treated with justice and kindness; it was a meritorious act to liberate them. The relationship of master and slave could be a close one, and might continue to exist after the slave was freed: he might marry his master's daughter or conduct his business for him.
Absent is any mention of the terror of enslavement, the castration of eunuchs, the raping of slave women, the pitiless conditions on farms and mines, or the unending humiliation of the slave status.
 Albert Hourani (1915-93). |
Unlike Mr. Hourani, Arab intellectuals recognize this reality and have responded with deep melancholy. For example, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian, wrote in 1988 about human rights abuses that "the last ten years witnessed an unprecedented scale of atrocities committed by several Arab governments against their own citizens." Judgments about the life of the mind are no less severe. Hisham Sharabi of Georgetown University writes that the Arab world is for the most part "a culturally and politically desolate and oppressive place in which to live and to work ... a difficult place in which to struggle to build a decent and humane society." Most pointedly, Nizar Qabbani asks, "Our culture? Nothing but bubbles in washtubs and chamberpots." This tone of desperation is completely absent from Mr. Hourani's detached and genteel "disturbance of spirits."
Finally, Mr. Hourani pursues a fashionably leftist agenda, impugning capitalism and attacking Israel, but with so fine a subtlety it borders on the surreptitious. Repeated use of qualifiers ("may," "might," "perhaps," "possible") allows the author to distance himself from his own assertions. He thereby implies what he cannot say. Here are two examples, both pertaining to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war:
- Explaining Arab fears of Israel, Mr. Hourani refers to reports predicting an Israeli attack on Syria, acknowledging in parentheses that these "may have been unfounded"; in fact, those reports are now universally recognized to have been disinformation, plain and simple.
- Mr. Hourani justifies Gamal Abdel Nasser's faulty decision to expel the United Nations forces from the Sinai with the observation that this decision "might have proved correct" had the U.S. government had "full control over Israeli policy." But the U.S. government never had full control over Israel; even to raise this possibility is irresponsible.
This anti-Israel agenda also leads to some strange assertions. Is it true, as he observes, that Israel had "nothing to lose" in the 1967 war because Washington would have rescued it? No reputable history records such a commitment by the U.S. government. And even if it had made such promises, the months that American forces would have needed to liberate Israel (as were needed for Kuwait) would have been time enough to massacre and disperse the Israeli population. Saying Israel had "nothing to lose" is flat wrong.
If you want to understand the Arabs, stay clear of Albert Hourani's apologetic. Instead, read Bernard Lewis's The Arabs in History which, even after forty years, remains the best introduction to a tangled subject.
May 17, 1996 update: In a Wall Street Journal book review out today, I highly commend Bernard Lewis' The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, which is much superior to Lewis' own 1950 study on Arab history, and even more superior to Hourani's poor excuse of a history reviewed above.
Mar. 21, 2002 update: In his review of a biography of Hourani, Martin Kramer elegantly explains what made this second-rater tick, concluding with "While Hourani lived, the sheer force of his personality kept readers turning his pages. Now that he is gone, the shelf seems fated to grow cold."
