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Book Review: "A History of the Arab Peoples" by Albert Hourani

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This is the first post in a series of posts that deals with books I have read or come across. The first book to receive this treatment is "A History of the Arab Peoples" by the late Lebanese scholar Albert Hourani. I finished reading this book about a year ago and I remember feeling somewhat underwhelmed by its premise. The book serves as an excellent primer to Arabs at the advent of Islam, but falls short of giving us as detailed a history as possible about Arabs prior to the coming of the world's second largest religious group. It seems to run on the hypothesis that modern Arab history started with the coming of Islam, and that the Arabs have had no history prior to this. The same has been said of the Palestinians, who are accused of having no history prior to 1948. The presence of a people and the socio-political climate that governed them in the past is just as important as the one in the present. In fact, it can be argued that much of what we see in Arab society today pre-dates Islam.

However, that's not my only gripe with the book. Hourani dabbles more into the literary aspects of the development of Arab societies and seems to steer away from the sectarian and ideological divides that shaped Arab society in the past as well as that of today. He does an excellent job in giving us a non-Western and non-glorifying view of the Caliphates and the Ottoman Empire that arose after it, but rarely are figures such as Saladin and events such as the Crusades are mentioned. If that wasn't enough, the writing style didn't help either: the pages are text-heavy and boorish to the point that there aren't a lot of stand-out factoids that portray the Arabs in a different light.

As far as narratives on Arabic history go, this is one of the most objective that anyone who is unfamiliar with the subject can read into. It's still worth a shot, and much better than the Orientalist diatribes that are passed off as "history" that fill the bookshelves today (Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes come to mind). Still, it doesn't give us the pre-Islamic narrative that offers a fresh perspective on the Arab peoples.

This is my new attempt at a scoring system, so feedback is welcome:
* Content: 3.5/5
* Writing style: 3/5
* Overall: 3.5/5 (not an average of the above)

 Salaam, from Saracen
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