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
Tauris, 221 pp, £12.99, January 2000, ISBN 1 86064 581 X

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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Vol. 23 No. 2 · 25 January 2001 » Robert Irwin » An Urbane Scholar in a Wilderness of Tigers (print version)
Pages 30-31 | 2733 words

Letters

From R.W. Johnson

I much enjoyed Robert Irwin's essay about Albert Hourani (LRB, 25 January). I didn't know him well but he was a gentle presence in Oxford for many years and, more specifically, at Magdalen, which has had a strange and continuous connection with the Middle East via Wilfred Thesiger, Thomas Hodgkin, Hourani himself, Roger Owen, Michael Gilsenan and, occasionally, princes and princesses from the Lebanon, the Emirates and elsewhere.

I remember mentioning to Hourani the embarrassment of teaching a young Saudi prince. The Prince himself, dressed as Elvis in gold lamé suit (and chauffeured in a golden Rolls Silver Shadow), the vizier (and bagman) never far away, the grasping college fellows waiting on the stairs to relieve the House of Saud of a million or two for this or that project. Hourani fixed me with a firm but gentle eye: 'How did it end?' he asked. 'He died of a drug overdose,' I replied, 'the family were furious with us, asked how we could have failed to prevent it.' 'It usually ends like that,' he said. 'Never trust royalty. And those who fawn on royalty – trust them even less.'

Similarly, I remember how Thomas Hodgkin, when in his most warmly pro-Islamic moods, which is to say most of the time, would come back from talking to Hourani and say: 'Albert agrees with me about Ibn Khaldun. You can't be a great historian without being a great philosopher. But he had some very upsetting things to say about Muslim fanatics too, which I enjoyed, er, much less.'

A law of irony decrees that characters like Hourani end up at Oxford and become its passionate devotees. Hourani, though he spent most of his career there, was not like that. He once asked me how we had come to make so-and-so a professor. 'He seemed to be the best candidate,' I replied. 'But that's incredible,' he said, 'that never happens in Oxford. There were other applicants who were far better known, more published, more aggressive, had more famous referees. How on earth could you appoint so-and-so?' Feeling by now a little worried, I repeated that he had seemed to be the best of the bunch. 'Of course he is,' Hourani sighed. 'By miles. But that's my point, what happened, what went wrong? I can't remember when Oxford last appointed the best man for the job.'

R.W. Johnson
Johannesburg