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Introduction
Islam in European Thought, by Albert
Hourani,Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991, 199 pp., Index.We are indebted to Albert Hourani for having written
on a great variety of Middle Eastern, Arabic, and Islamic themes. His
masterpiece, Arabic Thought in the
Liberal Age,1798-1939, [1]written almost thirty years ago, is an
indispensable source for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the
intellectual history of the modern and contemporary Arab world and North
Africa. Since his early days at Oxford University as a young intellectual and
lecturer and until his recent death, Albert Hourani, a Lebanese Christian grown
up in British Palestine, had been totally engaged with the intellectual issues
and problems of the Arab and the Muslim world. Concerning his History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge:
Harvard University press, 1991), published a few months before the book under
review appeared, an eminent reviewer says,To write a history of the Arabs as distinct from
that of the other peoples with whom their affairs have been inextricably
entwined is no easy matter. Since the seventh century and the advent of Islam,
when the Arabs emerged from the Arabian peninsula to conquer an empire in the
Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, the history of the Arabs has been
inseparable from the history of Islam. [2]In the same vein, Hourani tackles a theme that is of
value to Arabs, Muslims, and other Third World peoples who fell under European
domination and colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries namely,
the impact of Western hegemony on Eastern cultures, and, in our case, the
cultures of the Muslim world. His insights into how European thinkers and
travellers of the early modern period represented Islam and Muslims in their
writings are still relevant to the current and complex relationship between the
Muslim world and the West.Notes:[1]. Professor Donald M. Reid comments on Hourani's
work as follows: "Albert Hourani's survey of "The Present State of
Islamic and Middle East Historiography" [in Albert Hourani, Europe and the Middle East, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980] has one obvious lacuna: it fails to
mention the author's own Arabic Thought
in tie Liberal Age, 1798‑1939. This masterpiece, published in 1962
when its author was forty‑seven, has left its mark on a whole generation
of English‑speaking scholars of the Middle East." Donald M. Reid,
"Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age Twenty Years After," International Journal of Middle East
Studies, Vol. 14 (4) November 1982, p. 541.[2]. Shaul Bakhash, "In Search of the Arab
Soul," The New York Review o f
Books, Vol. XXXVIII (15), September 26,1991, p. 51.
