An Urbane Scholar in a Wilderness of Tigers 
Robert Irwin
- A Vision of the Middle East: An Intellectual Biography of Albert Hourani by Abdulaziz Al-Sudairi
A remarkably high proportion of those who now teach and write about the modern Middle East in this country were taught by Albert Hourani. He encouraged the historians he supervised to take an interest in developments in anthropology and sociology. More than anyone else, he was responsible for challenging the notion that the Ottoman period was a dark age of political and cultural stagnation for the Arabs. In his later writings he also increasingly queried the notion that the recent history of the Arabs had to be understood in terms of responses to Western challenges.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 22 February 2001 ] R.W. Johnson.
Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, which appeared last year, was his sixth non-fiction book on Middle Eastern history and culture.
Other articles by this contributor:
I am a false alarm · Khalil Gibran
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