A History of the Arab Peoples -

Albert Hourani

Faber and Faber Limited

1991

566 páginas

18h 52m

ISBN-13: 978057122664i

Hourani’s A HISTORY OF THE ARAB PEOPLES spans centuries and continents as he describes the history of Arabic-speaking people of northern Africa, Spain, and the Middle East. His history is divided into five parts: the making of a world (7th-10th centuries), which focuses on Islam itself; Arab-Muslim societies (11th-15th centuries), which emphasizes how Islam affected cities, countryside, and courts; the Ottoman age (16th-18th centuries); the age of European empires (1800-1860); and the age of nation-states (since 1939).

Given its scope, the book is necessarily general, and individual political events are given short shrift; instead, Hourani describes major cultural and social movements. There are vignettes about individual figures—a singer, a historian, a poet—but Arab political leaders receive only passing mention. Hourani repeatedly describes a “just” Islamic society, one rarely achieved, but the establishment of such a society (as in Iran) entails the power of religious men whose very influence violates Islamic tenets about separation of church and state.

Hourani’s text is supplemented by several maps, a thirty-page bibliography, an index, and tables listing the family of the prophet, the caliphs, dynasties, and ruling families. There is a wealth of information, summarized at the beginning of each of the five parts in the book; but readers may have reservations about some of his observations. To attribute the existence of Jewish ghettos to a ruler’s desire to “protect Jews from popular disturbances” is naive at best; to follow a discussion of “equal” men and women with one on rulers and subjects belies the so-called equality; and to associate the political Moslem Brotherhood with “an alternate model of a just society” is disingenuous. However, Hourani’s book is an invaluable contribution to any reader’s study of the Middle East.