Albert Hourani
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Albert Habib Hourani (Arabic: ألبرت حبيب حوراني) (March 31, 1915 – January 17, 1993) was a prominent scholar of Middle Eastern history through much of the 20th century.
He was born in Manchester, England, the son of immigrants from what is now South Lebanon. His family had converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Scottish Presbyterianism and his father was an elder of the local church in Manchester. Hourani himself, however, converted to Catholicism in adulthood.
Hourani was educated in Manchester and London before attending Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (with an emphasis on international relations in the politics section of the degree), graduating first in his class in 1936. During World War II, he worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and in the office of the British Minister of State in Cairo. After the war's end, he worked at the Arab Office in Jerusalem and London, where he helped prepare the Arab case for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.
He began his academic career, which would occupy the rest of his life, in 1948, teaching at Magdalen College, St. Antony's College (where he created and directed the college's Middle East Center), the American University of Beirut, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He ended his academic career as Fellow of St. Antony's College and Reader in the History of the Modern Middle East at Oxford. Hourani trained more academic historians of the modern Middle East than any other university historian of his generation. Today his students can be found on the faculties of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Hebrew University and the University of Haifa, among others.
Hourani's most popular work is A History of the Arab Peoples (1991), a readable introduction to the history of the Middle East and an international best seller. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1789-1939 (1962) is one of the first scientific attempts at a comprehensive analysis of the nahda, the Arab revival of the nineteenth century, and the opening of the Arab world to modern European culture, and remains one of the major works on this subject. Syria and Lebanon (1946) and Minorities in the Arab World (1947) are other major works. He also wrote extensive works on the orientalist perspective on Middle Eastern cultures through the 18th and 19th centuries, and he developed the influential concept of the "urban notables" -- political and social elites in provincial Middle Eastern cities and towns that served as intermediaries between imperial capitals (such as Istanbul under the Otoman Turks) and provincial society.
The top book prize in the Middle Eastern studies field is named the "Albert Hourani Book Award" and it is given annually by the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). Hourani was an Honorary Fellow of both MESA and the American Historical Association (AHA).
Hourani married Odile Wegg-Prosser in 1955, while teaching at Magdalen College, Oxford. He died in Oxford at the age of 77. Mrs. Odile Hourani (b. 1914) died in 2003, shortly after the tenth anniversary of her husband's death. Their daughter, Dr. Susanna Hourani, survives them. She is Professor of Pharmacology and Head of Department in the School of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences of the University of Surrey, UK.
[edit] External links
- Albert Hourani: Islam, Christianity and Orientalism an assessment of Albert Hourani which was published in the 2003 edition of the St Antony's College Record
- Albert Hourani (1915-93) an obituary published in the Bulletin of the Middle East Studies Association
- Abdulaziz A. Al-Sudairi, A Vision of the Middle East: An Intellectual Biography of Albert Hourani, London, I.B. Tauris.
