British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

Albert Hourani: Islam, Christianity and Orientalism

Author(s): Derek Hopwood
Source: British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Nov., 2003), pp. 127-136
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (November,2003),

30 (2), 127-1 3 6
30(2), 127-136

Albert
and

CarfaxPublishing
& Francis
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Group

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Hourani:

Islam,

Christianity

Orientalism

DEREK HOPWOOD*
(In memory of Albert Hourani, dedicated to Odile Hourani)
Albert Houranidied in January1993 after a lifetime devoted to the study of the
Middle East and Islam. This articleis an attemptto assess some of the influences
that helped to shape his intellectualand academic life and work by someone who
was his studentand then colleague for many years. On his death 'I felt as if part
of my own life had ended. As long as the teacher lived, one thought of oneself
as his student'.1

Looking at the whole of his life it is possible to single out three majorphases.
(1) His early life. He was born in Manchester,England,of Lebanese immigrant
parents. His family had been converted from Greek Orthodoxyto Scottish
Presbyterianism.Hourani often spoke of his family home in Manchester
where East met West, where many Lebanese and Arabs would gather, and
where his father was an elder of the local church. His brotherCecil wrote
about this period in his autobiographyand Albert himself wrote two shorter
biographicalpieces that mention it briefly.2He attended school at Mill Hill
near London and university at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read for
a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Then
a stay in Beirut, Cairo and Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s
(2)
introduced him to contemporaryIslam and to modem Arab nationalism
(about which he wrote a lot but with which I shall not deal here). He met
regularly with a group of fellow Lebanese in Beirut who discussed the role
of Arab Christiansin the Middle East and theirrelationswith Arab Muslims.
Charles Malik was a leading member of the group.
(3) Finally, his long period in Oxford that brought him into contact with
scholars there, particularlyHamilton Gibb, Professor of Arabic, and the
European orientalist scholar-emigres-Walzer, Schacht and Stem-who in
turn introducedhim to other Europeanorientalists,particularlythe FrenchCahen, Massignon, Berque. In addition to being influenced by the scholarship of these men he was deeply impressed by the spiritualityof three of
them-Gibb, Massignon and Berque.
* EmeritusReaderin ModernMiddle EasternStudies at St
Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK. This
paper was originally given as a lecture at St Antony's in January2003 to mark the 10th anniversaryof Albert
Hourani's death.
1 A.
Hourani,Islam in EuropeanThought(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1991), p. 37, quotingIgnaz
Goldziher on the death of his teacher, Fleischer.
2 C. Hourani.An
UnfinishedOdyssey;Lebanonand Beyond (London:Weidenfeldt, 1984). T. Naff (ed.) Paths
to the Middle East; TenScholarsLookBack (Albany:SUNY, 1993), pp. 27-56; N.E. Gallagher(ed.) Approaches
to the History of the Middle East; Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians (Reading: Ithaca, 1994),
pp. 19-45.
ISSN 1353-0194 print/ISSN1469-3542 online/03/020127-10 ? 2003 BritishSociety for MiddleEasternStudies
DOI: 10.1080/1353019032000126491

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DEREK HOPWOOD

In all of Hourani's scholarly writings we find there are two broad general fields
of interest:firstly, the study of Middle East history that culminatedin his major
book A History of the Arab Peoples;3and secondly, studies on aspects of Islamic
and Arabic thought, on how Arab thinkers, Muslim and Christian,absorbedor
rejected European ideas and on how European orientalist scholars interpreted
Islamic history and religion. This latter topic seemed to engage his mind in his
later years quite considerably. His last published work was Islam in European
Thought, a collection of papers that contained his final lectures with the same
title.
Houraniwas a committedChristianand it is clear that his faith played a major
role in the way he approachedhis work and in particularhis study of Islam. A
fascinating aspect of his Christianlife was his conversion to Catholicism. It is
clear that in the late 1930s, in Beirut, he was deeply interestedin religion as his
attendance at discussions on Christianity in a group with Charles Malik and
others demonstrates. 'In the American University [of Beirut] there is the
movement for the creation of a Christian philosophy in Arabic, which is
associated with Charles Malik, Professor of Philosophy in the University, so far
almost unknown but perhaps the greatest intellectual figure in the Arab world
today.'4 I am not sure whether at this time he had abandonedhis family faith.
Conversion to Catholicism is not uncommon amongst intellectuals but it is not
clear what it was in particularthat attractedhim. His friend at Oxford, Charles
Issawi, the Middle East economic historian,discernedhis interestin Catholicism
very early and claimed that 10 years before Hourani's conversion he had laid a
bet that he would convert. Was it the influence of Charles Malik? Was it the
structureof the Church he found satisfying? Was it the cultural and spiritual
aesthetic or the intellectualrigour?There can be two kinds of conversion and of
faith in general. One is the emotional experience, the claim to have had a direct
experience of God, and there is the more intellectual assessment of faith that
leads to commitment. I think that Hourani agreed with the notion of Cardinal
John Henry Newman that faith is an act of intellectual assent, made under the
discipline of self-control, prayer and right direction of the heart. Faith is not
simply blind assent. Man strives after a vision of God about which humanreason
continuously asks all the relevant questions. Hourani must have asked these
questions and come to the conclusion that to follow the path of Newman
(himself an intellectual convert to Catholicism) was the most satisfactory
answer.
Houranispoke about aspects of his faith in a sermonhe gave in the University
Churchof St Mary the Virgin as universitypreacherin 1976. I do not know how
university lay preachers are chosen or how it is known that certain people are
suitable, but Hourani used the occasion to speak both about his own faith and
about how it had influenced his attitudetowards work and towards other faiths.
It is interesting that he based most of what he said on the thoughts of John
Henry Newman, who had often preachedin St Mary's (as an Anglican). He said
that the title of his own sermon could have been 'On presumingto stand where
Newman stood' and added that 'echoes of his words will be heard in everything

3 A.
Hourani,A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).
4 A. Hourani, 'GreatBritain and Arab Nationalism 1943', unpublishedreport,pp. 84-85.

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ALBERT HOURANI

I have to say'.5 He was, he said, like Newman and many others, engaged 'in the
search for a faith ... by which we can live'.6 He found that faith, or, as he said,

he found the Kingdom of God and enrolled himself in it. His faith and his work
became intertwinedand the one influencedthe other. One of the most unperceptive things I have ever read in a biography is Abdulaziz al-Sudeiri's comment
in his biography of Hourani that 'Although the conversion proved to be an
importantsustainingforce in his life, it did not appearsignificantlyto recast his
scholarly writing and outlook'.7
For Houranithe ultimate reality was the voice of God speaking to the human
soul and to the individual conscience, the voice which guides one to exercise
tolerance, to live in peace with others, to a charity of forgiveness-and in his
studies he twice quoted Pope GregoryVII's words on the charitywe owe to one
another.8The ultimate goal of life for the believer was union with God and the
final reality was the isolated soul in the presence of God. Here we have echoes
of Newman's great poem on the journey of the soul to God-'The Dream of
Gerontius'.
Take me away, that sooner I may rise and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.

There is a striking passage in his sermon about what Houranicalls the religion
of Islam at its highest-that is, in Sufi thought.He says: 'All createdthings have
descended from the Divine Source in successive stages, and all strive to return
to that source; men, moved by their love of God, may ascend ... through the
world of images, to the courts of God'.9 This is the point where his vision of
Islam comes nearest to his vision of Christianity. But Christianity has that
essential extra dimension which is God himself descending and appearing in
flesh and in spirit. He wrote in 1955: 'It can mean nothing to say God became
Man, if we do not mean that He became one particularman'.10
This extra dimension that distinguishes Christianityfrom other religions gave
Houranithe certaintyof faith that he had writtenabout so forcefully in his earlier
years. Later, he became more reticent and one no longer found the bold
sentiments expressed in his first works that took one aback by their forthrightness and by the fact of their being used by a historianin particularnon-religious
contexts. Influencedby the views of the Beirut group, which, he wrote, regarded
'the Lebanese and Syrian Christiansas having a special mission ... to re-state
Christianityin Arabic, to stand for it in the face of the Moslem world'.ll It was
almost as though he felt threatenedand that he had to respond proportionately.
For example, in 1946 he wrote: 'Every human community must, if it would
avoid falling into mortal sin, make itself servant of something higher than
itself'.12Again, a little later, writing on racism: 'The idea that there is a moral
5 A. Hourani,Unpublishedsermon delivered in Oxford, 1976.
6
Ibid., p. 3.
7 AbdulazizAl-Sudairi,A Visionof the MiddleEast; An IntellectualBiographyofAlbert Hourani (London:I.B.
Tauris, 1999), p. 27.
8
Hourani,Islam in European Thought,pp. 9, 60.
9 Hourani,Sermon, p. 11.
10 A.
Hourani,A Vision of History; Near Eastern and other Essays (Beirut: Khayats, 1961), p. 26.
11 A. Hourani,Syria and Lebanon;A Political Essay (London:Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 265.
12
Ibid., p. 119.

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DEREK HOPWOOD

and intellectualgradationamong humanbeings ... implies that Christdid not die

for all of us all alike'.13
Faith gave him a clear patternfor his life and he lived up to it-remembering
of course the human weaknesses all are heir to. He said (in his sermon) that he
wanted to make clear to himself and othershis vision of life, leaving it to others
to judge him. This had profoundimplications for his personal and working life.
He was very sure of the place of religions in the world. 'Certain groups of
modern educated Arabs ... regard Islam and Christianityas mere survivorsof a
dark age, and ... look forward to their imminent extinction ... This hope is vain.
Revealed religion cannot vanish from the world to which it has broughtlight.'14

This certaintythat faith gave influenced his historical writing and gave him an
approachthat others may not have had-a concern with and a readinessto define
the concept of truth. He believed that an organizing principle of historical
thought could be Truthand defined Truthas what people believe.15If that is the
case then there must be many truths,yet truthwith a capital T implies that there
is only one truth,i.e. Christianity.A strongbelief must lead one to question the
'truths' of others, for as he wrote: 'If I affirm anything I am necessarily
excluding something else'.16
The Christian scholar of Islam has to find an acceptable method of writing
about his subject. Islam and Christianityhave found (find?)it difficult to give an
intelligible place to the other within their systems of thought. Hourani wrote
notably of the look of 'uneasy recognition' with which the two religions have
always faced each other.17He approachedthe other religion as a responsible
Christian scholar with, he wrote, a sense of a living relationship with those
whom he studied. There was a need to stretch out across the gulf created by
power, enmity and difference. In a real sense, he asserted,dialogue should be at
the heart of our studies.18
In the days of his stay in Beirut he had not been averse to expressing
prescriptive, bold opinions that aimed to set an agenda for Muslim-Christian
relations. For example, he claimed: 'The whole future development of the Arab
countries depends on a change in the spirit of Islam', in its 'living creative
spirit'.'9 In those days he saw in the relationshipbetween Arab Christiansand
Muslims only the 'contemptuoustolerationof the strong [Muslim] for the weak
[Christian]',a situation,he said, that must be changed. How could it be changed?
By absorbing differences into a deeper unity, in a mutual love for God that
would lead to 'a sort of humility and forgiveness'.20 The two sides, he wrote, had
to engage in a dialogue of fruitful tension. I do not think that in his later years
he would have insisted so openly on a change in Muslim attitudes, nor on the
possibility of a deeper unity in love.
In his sermon he set out three ways of approachingthe religion of the other.

13
Hourani, Vision of History, p. 110.
14 A.
Hourani,Minorities in the Arab World (Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 124.
15
Approaches to the History of the Middle East, p. 39.
Gallagher,
16
Hourani, Vision of History, p. 27.
17 Hourani,Europe and the Middle East (London:Macmillan, 1980), p. 4.
18
Hourani,Islam in European Thought,p. 89.
19 Hourani,Minorities, p. 123.
20
Ibid., p. 125.

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ALBERT HOURANI

(1) The way of argument,of trying to persuade others that our beliefs are the
only true ones. This is rather the way of missionaries.
(2) By trying to extract the common features of the two religions.
(3) Through what he termed 'witness', by which he meant making clear what
he believed and leaving it to others to judge the value of his writings and
of his faith.
He found confirmationof these three approachesin the writings of Newman,
who claimed that:
(1) The way of argumentcan only show that controversyis superfluous(if we
all understandeach other) or hopeless (if we cannot change our views).
(2) Trying to extract common features may lead to a situation where all
statements are accepted even if they contradicteach other.
need not dispute, we need not prove, we need but define. This latter is
We
(3)
surely the way of witness that Hourani adopted, attempting to define as
clearly as he could and leaving others to judge the value of his work.
The defining of another'sreligion must be done with reverence and respect, the
reverence of a Christianand the respect of the serious scholar. Houranichose to
write about Islam at what he called 'its highest', i.e. as taught and practisedby
the trained 'ulama' and as expressed by some Sufis.
He found many positive factors in Islam that strengthenedhis respect for it as
faith and a way of thought;they are humanfactors, however, as he stoppedshort
of ascribing direct divine inspirationto Islam. In general, he believeed that all
cultures producedby the human spirit have value and that their ideas should be
treatedwith respect. Islam is equally a manifestationof the human spirit, a form
of human reasoning in the attemptto know God, a valid but limited response to
the Truth.One can admire a virtuous Muslim life and treat with respect Muslim
scholars who revere the Qur'an, but in the end one cannot go as far as to see
Islam as an alternative form of salvation. In support of these views Hourani
quoted the formulationsof the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in defining
its attitude towards Islam. 'The Church looks with esteem upon the Muslims,
who worship the one living God ... who has spoken to men'.21 But behind this

statementthere lies of course the Roman Catholic certaintythat the one God is
the ChristianGod of the Vatican.
In his scholarly life Houraniwas deeply impressed and influenced by numerous other sensitive thinkers (mainly orientalist scholars) who could not dismiss
Islam out of hand22and who had something valuable to say about it. He
immersedhimself in the works of men such as Goldziher,Massignon, Gibb and
Marshall Hodgson. Amongst the many concepts he quoted with approvalfrom
them and others there is a notable one from Ignaz Goldziher, the Hungarian
Jewish scholar: 'A life lived in the spirit of Islam can be an ethically impeccable
life'.23 In Louis Massignon, a French Greek Catholic priest, a man to his mind
of disturbinggenius, he found a mystical empathywith Islam, althoughhe could
not accept his view that Islam was a stage of Christianity;in MarshallHodgson,
an American co-follower of Massignon and Gibb, he found compassion; and a
21
Hourani,Islam in European Thought,p. 40.
22
Hourani,Europe and the Middle East, p. 74.
23
40.
Islam in

Hourani,

European Thought,p.

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DEREK HOPWOOD

certain inspirationin Robin Zaehner (Spalding Professor of EasternReligions at

All Souls College, Oxford), whilst unable to accept his claim that Muhammad
was a genuine prophet.He commented on this claim that for Christians'it is, to
say the least, a matterof doubt whether,and in what sense, the Islamic revelation
can be regarded as valid'.24

So for Hourani, Islam was not a divine revelation but was an encountered,
contemporary, living religion followed by millions across the world and a
religion with a history. Therefore,it could be described and analysed as it is and
as it had been practised and interpreted.From his many writings it is possible
to discover what for him were the essential features of Islam. At the beginning
of his A History of the Arab Peoples he describes a journey taken by the great
Muslim historianIbn Khaldunin 1382 from Tunis, where he was in the service
of the ruler, to Alexandria and Cairo, where he took a post with the Mamluk
sultan. He also visited Damascus,Jerusalemand Mecca. Ibn Khalduncame from
a family that had left SouthernArabia to settle in Andalusia. Hourani used his
life to point up several lessons, among which was the fact that the Muslim world
had a 'unity which transcendeddivisions of time and space'25and that within
that world there existed a corpus of knowledge 'transmittedover the centuries
by a known chain of teachers'. It was a moral communitythat continuedto exist
even when rulers changed and one that preserved its faith in one God; a
community that observed prayers, fasts and pilgrimage in common. Hourani
admired and tried to understandthis 'profoundlyunified' society that was able
to withstandoutside shocks by taking in what was of value and refining it. He
was influenced and, he admitted,moved by Gibb's vision of the Islamic umma
persistingthroughouthistory.26It was this vision that he triedto perpetuatein his
own work. Unity was more importantthandisruptivemovements and factorsthat
tended to disturbit. Ibn Khalduncould travel throughthis ummaunhinderedand
discuss points of law or theology in Arabic with fellow scholars in numerous
cities.
This was the Sunni world of Islam and it is clear that this is the world that
best representedIslam for Hourani.It was the steady world that kept a balance
between extremes-a world in which the 'ulama' slowly accumulatedtradition
and in which Muslims strove for moral perfection, where Islam could be
observed without let or hindrance. As he put it, it was a world in which the
Shari'a was followed, the way 'by which men could walk pleasingly in the sight
of God and hope to reach Paradise'.27
This very positive view of Islam entailed writing about it, as he said, at its
highest, and another feature that attractedhim was Sufism 'at its highest'. He
disliked the more mundane aspects, what he considered the almost commercial
exploitationof the Sufi tarnqas.The sincere dedicated Sufi followers he found to
be men of the highest motives, men who in every age kept the world on its axis.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali-the twelfth century Islamic scholar-seemed to represent all that was best in the Sunni and Sufi worlds. He wanted to keep the
whole community on the right path by underliningall the moral implicationsof
24
25
26
27

Hourani,Europe and the Middle East, p. 74.

Hourani,History of Arab Peoples, p. 4.
A. Hourani,The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London:Macmillan, 1981), p. xiii.
Hourani,Arabic Thought,p. 2.

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ALBERT HOURANI

Muslim practices. Man's chief aim was always to draw nearer to God. While
perhaps not a full Sufi, Hourani saw in him all that was noblest in the Sufi
masters,whose aim was the 'utterabsorptionof the heartin the remembranceof
God'.28He quoted a sentence from Ghazali which does not sound very different
from Newman's Gerontius:'Worldlydesires began tugging me with their claims
to remain as I was, while the herald of faith was crying out, "Away! Up and
away!"'

29

Into the nineteenth century, Houranifound other scholars who had struggled
to preservethe ummain the face of the moder world. His book Arabic Thought
in the Liberal Age, 1798-193930 is a study of their responses to modernity and
it is interestingthat in the preface to the second edition he wrote that he should
have written a different book, one that emphasized continuity in the world of
Islam ratherthan a break with the past. There were at least two reasons for this
change of approach.Firstly, since the publication of the first edition a number
of studies had appearedthat stressed the continuity of Islamic thought in the
eighteenth century and he was very much influenced by them; and secondly,
continuity ratherthan change became more importantto him. He had, however,
singled out two scholars who had laid emphasis on preservingthe umma,Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad'Abduh. Both had stressed that all the basic
principles of Islam were valid and that they had only to be observed meticulously for Islam to prosper. Although al-Afghani perhaps seemed a little rough
to Hourani, he saw in 'Abduh an ideal type of human being and Muslim: 'In
later years [his] gentleness increased, and those who knew him were conscious
of his kindness and intelligence and a certain spiritualbeauty'.31
Houranidisliked the violence or extremismthat lately disruptedthis world. He
called the last chapterof his History of the Arab Peoples, which dealt with the
post-1967 period, 'A disturbanceof spirits'. It was almost as though he shut his
eyes to violent change. In his early book on minorities he had expressed
misgivings about extreme Shi'ism and wrote that it was essential that the 'gap
between the different Islamic sects should be bridged',32although I think that
later he came to appreciatemore the positive features of Shi'ism, even writing
that he would place greateremphasis on the Shi'ite traditionthan had Gibb. This
view developed later under the influence of a numberof Shi'ite scholars whom
he got to know well.
The single most important aspect in the preservation of the Muslim community was, in Hourani'sview, the continuityof knowledge transmittedover the
centuries by a known chain of teachers-the famous silsila. He returnedto this
theme many times in his writings. In his autobiographicalsketch he says that he
was introducedto this concept by his colleague at Oxford, RichardWalzer, who
'taught me the importanceof the continuity of scholarly traditions:the way in
which scholarship was passed from one generation to another by a kind of
apostolic succession'.33There are two aspects of the silsilsa: the one referringto
the Hadith (the Muslim traditions)passed througha recognized chain, the isndd,
28
Hourani,History of Arab Peoples, p. 170.
29
168.

Ibid., p.
A. Hourani,Arabic Thoughtin the LiberalAge, 1798-1939 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1983).
31 Hourani,Arabic
Thought,p. 135.
32
Hourani,Minorities, p. 124.
33 Naff, Paths to the Middle East, p. 38

30

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DEREK HOPWOOD

which Hourani admitted could be fabricated or faulty; and the other that he
valued in scholarly life, the relationshipof teacher and pupil and of colleagues.
He quoted Massignon, I believe with approval,that it is possible 'to hold a view
of history which sees the handing on of knowledge of God from one individual
to another as the only significant process, and therefore the process most
deserving of study'.34Hourani could see (with Massignon) this process in an
almost mystical light: 'History is a chain of witnesses enteringeach other's lives
as carriersof a truth beyond themselves.'35
In Islam the prophet Muhammad was the initiator of the chain of the
transmissionof knowledge. For the non-Muslim scholar of Islam the life of the
prophet has always posed the greatest problems of interpretation-in particular
the thorny question of whether he was the recipient of divine inspiration.We
have seen that Houranihimself did not accept a divine aspect to Muhammad's
mission, but to avoid causing offence, in his History of the Arab Peoples he
accepts that 'It seems best ... to follow the traditionalaccount of the origins of
Islam' but to do this with caution as there is room for scholarly discussion about
the way these beliefs developed.36We can see here a nod in the direction of
Crone and Cook's 'Haggarism',which caused such a stir on its appearancewith
their criticism of the traditional sources for the life of Muhammad. It is
interesting that in an earlier lecture given in 1974 he appearedto be still under
the influence of Haggarismwhen he said: 'Much of the traditionalbiography[of
Muhammad]begins to crumble if one looks at it closely and critically'.37
In a possible escape from having to deal with the theistic aspects of Islamic
history the historian can follow the advice of the Dutch scholar Snouck
Hurgronje,who suggested that Islam should be studied in its historical reality
without making value judgements about what it ought to be. This he extended
to the principle, with which Hourani agreed, of studying the society in which
Islam emerged and the societies in which it continues to exist, althoughHourani
believed that studying the societies of the different Islams was a task of the
social historian or anthropologist.He admired the work of scholars such as
Michael Gilsenan and others who stressed the specificity of different societies.
This was not the high Islam that Hourani sought but what he and others have
termed 'popular', the people's interpretation and observance of sometimes
non-orthodox practices. This led him to propose the principle that whatever
people believe to be Islam is Islam.38But he repeatedthat his 'intention... [was]
not to study these popular movements, but to confine [himself] to the high,
urban, literate traditionof Islam'.39
The final section of this paper deals with the third of the trinity of topics in
the title-orientalism. Hourani maintained a very deep respect for that much
maligned group of scholars-the orientalists-and felt uncomfortablewith some
of the stricturesin Edward Said's book Orientalism.When writing about Said's
theories he went almost as far as he could, without descending to polemics, in
criticizing them. He wrote restrainedlythat Said's methods of expression 'at
34 Hourani,Islam in European Thought,p. 97.
35 Ibid.
36

Hourani,History of Arab Peoples, p. 1.

37 Hourani,Europe and Middle East, p. 2.

38

Hourani,Islam in European Thought,p. 101.

39 Ibid., p. 102.

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ALBERT HOURANI

times bring him near to caricature'and that 'perhapshe makes the matter too
simple when he implies that [orientalism]is inextricablybound up with the fact
of domination'.40(Hourani often used the word 'perhaps' when he meant
'absolutely certainly'.) He is careful to give weight to some of Said's points but
regrettedthat the epithet 'orientalist' could no longer be used with the respect
he thought it deserved. As he wrote: 'The time has gone when orientalistscould
speak of themselves, without fear of contradiction, as contributing from the
He
purest of motives to the spread of knowledge and mutual understanding.'41
had an almost mystical regardfor the clan of orientalists-'priests of a mystery'
he called them-whose task was 'to lay [their]hands in reverence and devotion
upon ... the past'.42 They are all part of that silsila-of

orientalist scholars rather

than 'ulama'-into which any aspiring young scholar should insert him- or
herself. He believed that he did not form part of a chain himself and that he was
not an orientalist,but it is clear that he felt very much a colleague of the scholars
alreadymentioned.This feeling deepened as he grew older. Oxford, he felt, had
made no mark in Oriental studies until the arrival of Professor Gibb, together
with Walzer, Schacht and Stem. He in particularrevered Gibb. 'Behind us there
stood the great figure of ... Gibb ... even when physically absent he was spiritu-

ally with us, the murshid guiding our steps in different ways'.43 Walzer
introducedhim to 'the central tradition of Islamic scholarship in Europe, that
expressed in German'44-and so obviously omitted by Said. Stem seemed to be
the 'very embodimentof that tradition'.45These colleagues at Oxford strengthened the link with European orientalist scholarship-the Italians, the Germans
and the French. Two Frenchmenmade a deep impression, orientalistswith their
semi-mystical attachmentto the world of Islam, both, like him, Catholics. Louis
Massignon fascinated him, a man who seemed to dwell partially in another
place, with a vision of the mystical, a pilgrim as Houraniwrote, in a world that
was not for him. In a photographof him enteringJerusalemwith T. E. Lawrence
and the allied forces in 1917, Houranidiscernedin his eyes a man with a vision
of another Jerusalem.46That is, the Catholic vision of an orientalist. Hourani
found this too in Jacques Berque, the other Frenchmanwho had spent a lifetime
in the study of the Middle East. In a tributeto him, he picturedBerque devoting
his later life to the study of Islam, which was for him 'the "other", to be
apprehended and accepted in itself: a fitting task for a long and fruitful
retirement'47in his home village of St Julien-en-Bom, which as Hourani added
significantlylies 'on the road to Santiago de Compostela', a seemingly irrelevant
remarkuntil one realizes that for Hourani that city must have representedthe
ultimate goal for the Catholic scholar-pilgrim.
In his writings,Houraniremaineda strong defenderof the orientalisttradition.
He praised the work of the earliest orientalistscholars, showing that they wrote
and related to the world as they did as their minds were inevitably formed by
40

41
42
43
44
45
46
47

Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid, p. 62.
Ibid., 1.c.

Hourani,Islam in European Thought,p. 61.

Naff, Paths to the Middle East, p. 38.
Ibid., I.c.
Hourani,Islam in European Thought,p. 116.
Ibid., p. 135.

135

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DEREK HOPWOOD

the culture of their age and by the ideas and convictions their lives had taught
them. By and large they succeeded, often working in isolation and as pioneers
in difficult topics. They had to do many things and Hourani admittedthat it was
'not surprisingthat they did not do all of them equally well'.48Their knowledge
and use of oriental languages, often criticized as tools of imperialism,Hourani
considered to be liberating forces enabling them to penetrate different cultures
without ulterior motives. In general it is clear that he held the orientalist
contributionto knowledge as being much more positive than does Said, and he
wrote approvinglyof the scholars de Sacy, Lane, Massignon and many others,
so often criticized by Said.
How does one end this survey of another'slife, of a man who himself devoted
himself to the study of the other, of a man who made such a deep impact on the
lives of others? Hourani said that 'Edward [Said] once asked [the] question,
"How can one understandthe other?"One could answer, "One has to do one's
best".' But more than that I think he gave us a fitting ending, a fitting summary
of how he thought we should live and how we should relate to others in this
world. In the preface to the English translationof Jacques Berque's book Egypt;
Imperialismand Revolution,he asked: 'Is it possible to grasp the essential nature
of a country other than one's own? Yes, in the sense in which one can know a
human being other than oneself: throughpatience, clarity and love, and with a
final acceptance of the mystery of otherness'.49

48

Ibid., p. 35.

49 J. Berques, Egypt; Imperialismand Revolution (London:Faber and Faber,

1972), p. 7.

136

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