Hourani, Albert Habib

▪ 1994

      British historian (b. March 31, 1915, Manchester, England—d. Jan. 17, 1993, Oxford, England), was a foremost authority on the Middle East, director (from 1958) of the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and author of the popular best-seller A History of the Arab Peoples (1991). Hourani, the son of a Lebanese Christian immigrant, attended Magdalen College, Oxford, and taught for two years at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. After working in the British Middle East office in Cairo during World War II, he returned (1948) to Oxford to take up a teaching fellowship. Hourani was instrumental in the establishment of the prestigious Middle East Centre at St. Antony's and was much admired as a visiting lecturer, notably at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He retired in 1980, but he gained unexpected popularity when his eloquent and insightful Arab history was published during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis. Hourani also wrote numerous scholarly papers, published Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 in 1962, and contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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