Customer Reviews

A History of the Arab Peoples (Library Edition)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When Hourani titled his book, "History of the Arab Peoples," he was being honest and literal--- the book is literally a history of the peoples, including the development of their interpretations of Islam, the formation of various schools of thought on the Islamic law and how literally it was to be interpreted, the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism and nationalism in the post-imperial period.

This is not a book about wars, nations, or heroes: the Crusades are barely mentioned, Salah-al-Din gets scant mention, as do Timur, the Mongols, or other great conquerors mythologized in Western poetry and children's stories. Rather, this is a book about society, about urbanization, about economic migration, about the development of political and national consciousness, about the development of literatures, about the use of colloquial versus classical Arabic in poetry, about the rise of Ottoman bureaucracies, and the basis of their legitimacy and power.

In short, this book is a history of the peoples: what shaped their intellectual development, the history of their cultures, etc. I think this is the right emphasis, because the political history (at least for the past 100 years) was mostly imposed by outsiders and is therefore (in my opinion) superficial, and is still in a state of fast flux and definition (e.g. what will be the political outcome in Iraq?), whereas a study of the core Arab / Islamic identity seems to be a more solid foundation from which one can attempt to understand the political structures that have been built. Put another way, Hourani's book will never go out of date, whereas a book that attempted more to explain the current politics of the Middle East would only survive as long as the next treaty or revolution. Yes terrorism is completely unemphasized, but that is appropriate to the purpose of this history, and does not diminish from its importance or usefulness at all: you will not achieve any understanding of the Arab peoples by studying terrorism, but you will go a long way toward understanding terrorism by studying the history of the Arab peoples.

I agree with previous reviewers that more exposition of the differences in the Islamic schools of thought would have been helpful, as would have been a glossary (versus having to flip to the first reference to that word in the text). I would have also liked more emphasis on scientific, technological, financial and economic innovation, as opposed to the emphasis mostly on philosophical innovation. The treatment of debate on the proper role of logic and argument in the study of Islam is quite good. Finally, the author adopts a secular, non-Western viewpoint that is quite refreshing and appropriate.

I finish most books in a week. Even the most punishing efforts I can conclude within a fortnight. Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples took me two months. This extended duration was not caused by any inability to fully understand it's content, but for the simple fact that I continually avoided picking it up.

The unconscionable tragedy of September 11th inspired me to select this book from my shelf, purchased long before, to learn something more of the lands and events from which the terrorists sprung. History of the Arab Peoples is, in actuality, two books. The first half of the work deals not so much with the Arab peoples, but with the institution of Islam. Arab Christians and Jews receive short shrift as do any major historical event by Western reckoning. You will find scant reference of the Crusades, of Jerusalem, of colonial strife. Instead, we learn not what the Arab Peoples did, but the boundary of Islam within which they did it. Truly, the first 250+ pages would be better entitled A History of Islam.

The latter half of the book consists mainly of the 19th century forward and it is here that Hourani finally uncouples, to whatever extent possible, the Arab peoples from Islam. Though he pays scant attention to events and prefers mainly to discuss socio-economic factors, the book manages to vault from mind numbing to something passably interesting.

All things considered, I didn't enjoy this book. Still, my disappointment stems not from what the book is, but rather from what the book is not. It is not a History of the Arab Peoples - a true history would predate Muhammad - but an in depth tour of Islam followed closely by a treatise on modern-day Arabic society. Do not read this book if a narrative Arabic history is what you seek.

Although I'm not an expert in Arab history per se, I am something of a student of Islamic religious sciences- which is incidentally a huge chunk of the Arab intellectual tradition (along with philosophy). Hourani masterfully covers the three basic disciplines- sharia (law, jurisprudence), kalam (theology), and Sufism (mysticism, spirituality)- and traces their development historically, frequently quoting primary sources. It is certainly one of the best, most comprehensive treatments I have come across. In regards to some reviewers faulting Hourani for not devoting enough space to Prophet Muhammad- I believe Hourani made a wise choice; he basically limited his treatment to what everyone can agree on, which I think is appropriate since this is a book on Arab and not Islamic history. However, it is indeed sometimes difficult to separate Arab from Islamic history; Imam al Ghazali, a key figure in this book and a towering figure in Islamic scholasticism, was actually a Persian, while Saladin, the most famous Muslim leader during the Crusades, was of Kurdish background. Indeed, one could even argue that the Arabs had a relatively limited political/economic role in Islamic history after 900 AD. compared to the Persians and Turks.

To those who say this is a boring book, or there isn't any history I laugh. This is the most complete chronicle of Arab History to date. Boring? yes if you're used to reading your history in the tabloids. The book covers thirteen centuries of history in 458 pages. It starts in the seventh century, introducing the Arab world at its first critical turning point: the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. Before the Prophet the people lived in a state of jahiliyya (or ignorance of religious truth).
After giving a good background on the Prophet the book moves swiftly to describe the Arab world after his death. He does this in such a way as to include sociology, politics, religion (of course), culture, war, alliances, and literature. No other author can claim such a comprehensive outlook on the situation as Hourani.
Next his analysis takes the same broad scope on the Ottoman age and discusses the last, great empire of the Arab world (although they are not Arab). He discusses how the Arab people responded to these outside rulers and finally how the Ottoman empire responded to the growing power of the European empires.
He goes on to discuss how the European empires controlled the Arab world, how they fought over the land and trade routes, and how the Arab world responded to this. He discusses how education was very much Europeanized (especially in the Magrib, or northern Africa, where Arab culture did not affect the culture as much from the beginning).
In the last part he discusses the age of nations and the conflicts which aroused from having been colonized (not in the sense you would think however, instead of purely blaming the colonizers he merely shows how this created great differences in the culture and political and religious ideals of the people). He discusses the importance of the creation of Israel, the successive wars of 1967 and 1973 between the Arabs and Israel, the fight between Mauritania and Morocco and Spain over the Western Sahara, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Iran-Iraq war. This is essential information to understanding the modern Arab world.
You will not find a book with more information and less bias on the subject. If you are interested in the problems of the region today, you must read this book.

Hourani's book is not light reading because of its rich details and incredible depth and breadth. In it, the history of the Middle East from pre-Islamic times to the present is chronicled - the majority of the book covering the Islamic world.

To one previously only briefly familiar with the area, the book was a little overwhelming. The information came fast and furious; fortunately the book was well written and read easily. Much of it deals not with political history, but rather with broader social themes: rural life compared to urban life, the common man compared to the educated elite, women and their role in Islamic society.

The only issue I had with this otherwise wonderful book was its lack of explaination of the various legal philosophies. (I am still puzzled between the differences of Hanafi, Maliki and Shaf'i interpretations of shari'a - Islamic law.) The fact that this is such a minor point given the scope of the book is testament to its otherwise fabulous nature.

Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples is a widely regarded general history of the Arab world. This is too bad, since as history the book is of low quality, with significant problems of organization and, where relevant to Hourani's apparent biases, factual accuracy. It does have its redeeming elements, but on the whole is for a variety of reasons not a reliable source as a general history of the Arab world, especially for the beginner.

Being the author of a general history of the Arab world myself, before I explain why I evaluate the book negatively I would like to suggest some alternatives, lest I be accused of attacking a rival publication out of self-interest. Philip K. Hitti's The History of the Arabs is a very detailed history which runs from pre-Islamic times to the 19th century. Arthur Goldschmidt's Concise History of the Middle East covers Turkey, Iran and Israel as well as the Arab world and is well-organized for beginners. It was the first general history of the Middle East I read as an undergraduate. Bernard Lewis' The Middle East focuses more on concepts and the flow of history but is also appropriate for those without a strong background in the region.

This book was first published in 1991. This review is based on the 1992 paperback version by Warner Books.

The initial weakness of this book begins with the very first chapter; although containing 458 pages of main text, Hourani's history devotes a mere seven pages to the pre-Islamic period. This is pretty amazing, for anyone familiar with that period, since Arab history prior to Islam is roughly as long as Arab history after it. Exactly how far back Arab peoples go in history is a matter of dispute, but certainly there were people one could call "Arabians" as far back as the beginning of the first mellinnium BC, or 1,600 years prior to Muhammad. The evidence is sporadic for sure, and no writer would give it equal prominence with later times, but seven pages is pretty paltry.

One might suspect an Islamic bias here, but the problem continues in the key early periods of Islam. The life of Muhammad and his immediate successors who established the basis for the Muslim world, spanning about a half century from Muhammad's first vision to the death of his son-in-law and successor Ali, get only 11 pages. The first Arab empire, the Umayyads (661-750), gets seven pages, and the Abbasid Empire (750-circa. 945), which is usually thought of as the "Golden Age of Islam," gets only six. This means 37 pages for the first 2,000 years of Arab history, including its framing epoch, and over 400 pages for the next 1,000. This would leave the uninitiated reader entirely without much sense of proportion.

What makes this book highly unrecommended for the beginner is its weak sense of organization. The middle time period between the collapse of Abbasid authority - roughly AD 950 - and the ascendance of the Ottoman Empire over the Arab world in 1517 is intrinsically a difficult time period to understand and a more difficult one on which to write a history. This is due to the fact that rather than there being one dominant power or a few powerful states, there is instead a multiplicity of dynasties with genuine authority in some areas not extending beyond the town level with a multifarious mixture of Sunni and Shia, Arab, Persian and Turkic ruling groups, not to mention the Latin states. Hourani makes no serious attempt to help the reader keep all of it straight by moving from a chronological approach prior to 950 to a topical one. There are ten chapters covering this time period and the social history of part of the previous two periods (the Umayyads and the Abbasids). There is one chapter which discusses the major power struggles of the time. If you want to understand the relative historical roles of the Buyids, the Fatimids, the Zengids, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks and their contemporaries, read something else.

It is within these ten chapters that this book contains its major strength - its "social history," or its description of the development of the Arab world. In fact I cited Hourani on the social history sections of my own book. In this regard, Hourani really is better than the alternatives. Over 200 pages of the book is devoted to detailing various aspects of how the Arab world came to be prior to the Ottomans. So for those who have already read a general history of the Middle East or the Arab world and want a more specialized knowledge, these chapters are quite useful.

I have several objections to how this book handles a variety of issues of current interest. This book was written during a time period when there was a great emphasis on negating certain negative images of Arabs and Muslims, to the point of deemphasizing any aspect of the Arab world which might be interpreted negatively. The word "jihad" doesn't even have an entry in the index, although it is used, or perhaps, misused. On page 247, Hourani describes a traditional view stipulating that the ruler has an obligation "to pursue jihad by maintaining the strength of the kingdom's defense..." This gives a misimpression, because legally jihad has two military meanings - the defense of Muslim lands and the Muslim community's collective obligation to spread Islam through conquest. Although jihad has a spiritual as well as martial application, its use is overwhelmingly in the military context, and while Muhammad's battles probably could be described as defensive, the vast majority of military actions between that time and the 19th century involved offensive operations (the Christian counter-offensives known as the Crusades being a major exception).

More broadly, the single most influential Islamist movement of the modern age, the Wahhabis, get only a few scattered mentions, and there is no real indication of the wave of extremism which by 1991 had been felt for some time. The primary non-Islamist ideological influence, Marxism, is discussed of course, but the influence of Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s is left out. Nazi Germany is mentioned once in passing, and in the same paragraph on page 331 Palestinian leader Amin Husseini is mentioned, but it isn't mentioned that he was a strong supporter of Nazis, that he moved to Germany during the Second World War and played an active role in the Holocaust, or that despite this he was made leader of the Palestinian cause by the nascent Arab League after the war.

Hourani's account of the 1967 is incredibly inaccurate, giving the impression that Egypt engaged in some bluster and then Israel started the war. He mentions Nasser's demand that the UN clear out of the Suez Canal zone, and includes the defense pact with Jordan, but omits a key fact - the mobilization of Egyptian forces in the Sinai. Once Egypt did this, Israel had no choice but to attack, because of its small population its economy could not handle an extended mobilization, while Egypt could. Hourani also doesn't mention the statements by Arab leaders to the effect that all Jews would be wiped out in the coming war.

On the whole, this is a useful book if one already has a framework understanding of Arab history and if one understands the slant that is being presented on issues of contemporary concern. Otherwise, I do not recommend buying it.

Mr. Hourani's book was certainly worth my time reading. However, readers who have become accustomed to the sort of objective, relentlessly honest treatment that European-American history commonly receives, will be sorely disappointed. Mr. Hourani writes with such delicacy that he leaves the reader with a grossly -- indeed, dangerously -- incomplete understanding of Arabic history.

In the interest of space, I will discuss only one example, though in considerable depth. The reader will find others examples if he or she chooses to purchase the book.

Slavery had an incredibly deep and broad footprint in Arabic society. Although no large segments of the economy were ever based on slave production (as in other nations), slaves were nonetheless omnispresent; as many as 11-18 million black slaves alone are thought to have been imported to Arab nations between 650AD and 1900AD (perhaps two-thirds of them female). Castrated slaves were used to guard harems, which were themselves often full of female slave 'concubines' whose consent to sex was neither sought nor required. Other slaves worked in Saharan salt mines, Egyptian gold mines, Iraqi swamp drainage projects, as well as agricultural fields, businesses, and markets throughout Arab lands. Many were porters or other laborers.

The circumstances, experiences, and outcomes of slaves in Arab nations was vastly more varied than those of North America. The cultural and economic impacts of slavery on Arab society, and the care with which the Quran addresses the topic, are extensive. Yet Mr. Hourani devotes just a bit over one page, exactly 47 lines (out of 458 pages of actual text), to slaves and slavery. Hourani's virtual cover-up of a vital part of historic Arab culture is astonishing.

Much of his already slim coverage consists of an amazingly idealized description of how slavery was supposed to work. Hourani states that shari'a insisted that slaves should be treated with justice and kindness; the reader would never know that the rules for slavery were very often violated to the slaves' detriment, since Hourani only describes the ideal, carefully avoiding any discussion of the reality. Mr. Hourani fails to note that, for every slave 'liberated' by his owner, several others died in captivity. For each slave enjoying a 'close relationship' with his master, others were routinely whipped or beaten. For each slave permitted to 'marry his master's daughter', there were several female slaves compelled by force to submit to the master's sexual apetite. Not only is it a betrayal of humanity to dismiss so very much human suffering, but one can never have a proper understanding of Arab history without taking a close look at Arab slave-holding.

Further, on page 298 of the paperback edition, Hourani states that, by and large, slavery was outlawed by 1914. This is outright deceit. Although this was true of European-ruled Arab regions, independent Arab states didn't outlaw slavery until considerably later. Ibn Saud agreed to halt the slave trade in 1927, but the practice in Saudi Arabia was not outlawed until 1962, and continued (according to the UN) even into the 1970's. In 1953 and 1958, the Qatar delegations to Queen Elizabeth II included slaves in their retinues. Yemen and Oman did not abolish slavery until 1969-70. Even then, the practice continued quietly. Hourani undoubtedly knows this, but chooses to mislead his readers.

This book is far from worthless, but it must be read with care. Mr. Hourani could not be troubled with asking any hard questions and revealing any controversial truths. Had authors been so gentle with Pres. George W. Bush's record, he'd have been nominated for sainthood by now.

I was disappointed in this book for many reasons. As has been pointed out, the book's title is misleading. It is not really a history of the Arab peoples as much as a history of Islam. There is virtually nothing about the Arab peoples pre-Islam. Certainly it is an ambitious topic for a one-volume book, and perhaps because of this the book is basically superficial, where whole decades of turmoil in some countries are sometimes dashed off in a phrase. The only place in the book where Hourani gets specific is in three excruciating chapters about the fine points of Islam (Chapter 9: Ways of Islam, Chapter 10: The Culture of the `Ulama, and Chapter 11: Divergent Paths of Thought). If you are going to read this book, I think you could skip these chapters and enjoy the book a lot more. They are not necessary to understand the rest of the book. Hourani's prose is not very inspired. I found most of it tough slogging. This book has been on my shelf for several years, but I only just now got around to reading it. Perhaps since it was published, other works on the subject have become available. I would prefer a secular and more objective approach. I would recommend this one only if nothing else is available.

I think this is an excellent book and Mr. Hourani should be given the full credit of writing a master-peace on this complex subject. I do think, however, that the name of the book is a bit misleading and it would have been sufficient to call it "The Arab People" in order not to confuse those who are looking for a day by day description of Arab history. I highly recommend this book.

If you are looking to understand the basic outline of Arabic Muslim history and cultural development, this is the book for you. Hourani begins his history with the birth of Mohammed and brings up to the near-present. Filled with excellent map, photographs, and illustrations, lucid and concise writing, and astute analyses this book serves as a great introduction to Arabic Muslim history.