Albert Hourani was born the son of immigrants from South Lebanon. He studied Philosophy, Politics, Economics and History (with an emphasis on international relations)at the Magdalen College in Oxford. He graduated 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 he helped prepare the Arab case for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.
In 1948 he started teaching at Magdalen College, St. Antony's College, the start of an academic career which would last the rest of his life. He also taught at the American University of Beirut, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, ending his academic career as Fellow of St. Antony's College and Reader in the History of the Modern Middle East at Oxford. Many of the academic historians we find in Universities all over the world today where his students.
As an adult, Hourani converted to Christianity. He married Christine Mary Odile Wegg-Prosser in 1955. He died in Oxford at the age of 77 and was buried at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford.
This book is an exposition of the various strains of thought which existed in the Arab Muslim world during the period leading from the French Revolution up to the beginning of World War II (and encompassing with it during this period the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of colonialism). It's an intellectual history of the period, highlighting some of the most prominent individuals who sought to reform Islam to face the challenges and opportunities of this new era.
In many respects the book can be seen as a more thorough companion to Pankaj Mishra's "From the Ruins of Empire", going into greater detail about the lives and beliefs of people such as Jamaladdin al-Afghani, Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Rida. The book does not exclusively focus on Muslim thinkers and also looks at the ideas and political programs prominent Christian Arabs as well, and how they dovetailed with Muslim reformists and the nascent class of people who could be described as "secularists" in various different ways.
The book is far more accessible than a typical academic work and was really a pleasure for this among a few other reasons. The breadth and scope of the history it covers is very admirable; the author is steeped in the various currents of thought which characterized this hugely significant period. It also gives a good early account of the beginnings of the Islamic Reformation, something which we are still in the midst of in various ways.
The influx of new ideas and growth of new doctrines advocating means of modernizing Islam to help face the challenges of the modern world are ably documented here. It is also thoroughly shown that the calls made by some politicians and media figures for an "Islamic reformation" today are in fact ignorant of a much broader historical picture. The the past 200 or so years have precisely been the "reformation", a period of incredible intellectual upheaval and tumult which has created all manner of Islamic movements and is still creating new ones. Indeed, the Al Qaeda's of the world are as much the children of this profound development as the various "liberal Muslims".
There is also something deeply melancholy and tragic about this book which Hourani surely could not have predicted decades ago when it was published. The longstanding intellectual and philosophical bases of the modern Arab world - which he describes the formation of here in great detail - have been violently coming apart in recent years. The grand ideas so eloquently and hopefully put forward have for some countries ended in abject bloodshed (Syria, Iraq) and in others fierce tyranny (Egypt).
The full history is not yet written (as it can never really be) but any of the people whose lives and ideas are profiled in this book would surely have been devastated to see the state many Arab Muslim societies are in today. Regardless where they stood on the spectrum from Islamism to absolute secularism, they all advocated representative government, equal rights and peaceable relations between religions, and both economic and human development. Many of their societies have instead fallen prey to either radicalism or absolutism, a state of affairs which was partly brought about in the Arab world by the violent defeat of the Arab nationalists by the Zionist movement, and partly by the frequent repression and inflexibility of its proponents at home. Independence was the initial goal of these movements, but they faced hurdles after that point which were even more difficult to surmount.
In anycase this was was a hugely enjoyable and edifying book. It was not easy to track down, but it was more than worth the effort.
Hourani's masterpiece, and a must read for anyone interested in the Arab Liberal age. Substantially superior to his History of the Arab People; Highly recommended.
This was a great book, and I can see why it is a classic in the field. Hourani explains the thought of the major Arabic thinkers in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and details their interactions with European thought during this time. Europe was the gold standard of civilization and progress not only for Europeans, but for many thinkers from other civilizations, and European ideas were seen as a source of strength by those who admired it. Interestingly, several Egyptian thinkers in the 19th century believed that Islam could take on European science, social thought (esp. Comte), nationalism, and secular reason and give them their proper place. By the twentieth century, Arabic secularists emerged who were reversing the relationship, with secular thought and nationalism in control and Islam (or Christianity, for Arabic Christians) along for the ride. Here's a quote that illustrates this transition:
"The writers of the school of [Muhammad] `Abduh saw themselves as a middle group, steering a careful course between extremes: on one side the traditionalists, on the other side the secularists. Their object was to accept and encourage the institutions and ideas of the modern age but link them to the principles of Islam, in which they saw the only valid basis for social thought, the 'political law accepted by all' of which Bakhit spoke. In the process they were led ever nearer to the second of the two extremes [the secularists], simply because it was this and not the first which presented the real danger. Rigid conservatism would in due course show its incapacity to understand and therefore to control the modern world, and in the end might just wither away. But the ideas of the modern world, precisely because they were irresistible, had the power both to destroy and to remake Islamic society--to destroy it if left unchecked, to remake it if harnessed to the eternal purposes of Islam--; and in the attempt to harness them, more and more concessions were made to them" (193).
Those influenced by modern European thought dominated the political scene in Egypt from the rise of Muhammad Ali (not the boxer) in the early 1800s until the rise of the Muslim Brothers in the 1930s, and even today the government is still secular, for now. Secular nationalists and socialists also dominated other Arabic lands outside of the Arabian peninsula for a long time. Since Hourani's book was originally written in the 1960s, his epilogue looks at the Sharia as the law of Arabic lands as a thing of the past, which is ironic given the rise of Islamist movements in the 1970s. He didn't realize then, understandably, what has become clear now, that the failure of secular nationalist regimes in governing and in wars against Israel helped to make Islamism an option.