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A review by rc90041
A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani
4.0
Can I recommend this to others? I wish I could. But the truth is, most readers are unlikely to make it through the ~458 pages of too often punishingly arid prose unless there is some threat of a test, term paper, or perhaps book-club shame hanging over their heads. And that is too bad, because there is much to be learned from this book, especially regarding schools of Islamic thought, the organization of the Abbasid and Ottoman empires, the confrontation between the Arab states and Western powers in the Age of Empire, Arab socialism and nationalism, Nasirism, the rise of the Ba'ath Party, the haphazard drawing of lines by the French and British to create today's Arab Frankenstates, etc.
The book suffers from its ambitious attempt to cover the entire region from pre-Islamic times to the present (in this case, 1991): one feels as if Hourani goes down a checklist at times, at major points on the chronology, ticking off countries, to make sure he hasn't missed one. The book also seems to actively resist drawing in the reader by employing a voice that is insistently located at some unidentifiable and utterly non-human Archimedean point. If written today, I'm sure a younger historian would throw in many slice-of-life scenes to give some blood to the encyclopedic proceedings. Or, like Eric Hobsbawm sometimes does in his work, Hourani could have humanized this a bit, and let fall the pretense of geometric objectivity, by offering his story (Lebanese Christian family that immigrated to England).
Again, I do wish I could in good faith push this book on others, because an understanding of the region, getting beyond Bernard Lewis tutorials on the "Arab mind" and the "Arab street" or Thomas Friedman's business-class-airport-lounge generalities, seems crucial right now. If you feel like you may need to know a bit more about this part of the world, this is probably a good place to start.
The book suffers from its ambitious attempt to cover the entire region from pre-Islamic times to the present (in this case, 1991): one feels as if Hourani goes down a checklist at times, at major points on the chronology, ticking off countries, to make sure he hasn't missed one. The book also seems to actively resist drawing in the reader by employing a voice that is insistently located at some unidentifiable and utterly non-human Archimedean point. If written today, I'm sure a younger historian would throw in many slice-of-life scenes to give some blood to the encyclopedic proceedings. Or, like Eric Hobsbawm sometimes does in his work, Hourani could have humanized this a bit, and let fall the pretense of geometric objectivity, by offering his story (Lebanese Christian family that immigrated to England).
Again, I do wish I could in good faith push this book on others, because an understanding of the region, getting beyond Bernard Lewis tutorials on the "Arab mind" and the "Arab street" or Thomas Friedman's business-class-airport-lounge generalities, seems crucial right now. If you feel like you may need to know a bit more about this part of the world, this is probably a good place to start.