A History of the Arab Peoples

Synopsis

"When Hourani titled his book, "History of the Arab Peoples," he was being honest and literal--- the book is literally a history of the peoples, including the development of their interpretations of Islam, the formation of various schools of thought on the Islamic law and how literally it was to be interpreted, the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism and nationalism in the post-imperial period.
This is not a book about wars, nations, or heroes: the Crusades are barely mentioned, Salah-al-Din gets scant mention, as do Timur, the Mongols, or other great conquerors mythologized in Western poetry and children's stories. Rather, this is a book about society, about urbanization, about economic migration, about the development of political and national consciousness, about the development of literatures, about the use of colloquial versus classical Arabic in poetry, about the rise of Ottoman bureaucracies, and the basis of their legitimacy and power.
In short, this book is a history of the peoples: what shaped their intellectual development, the history of their cultures, etc. . . . The treatment of debate on the proper role of logic and argument in the study of Islam is quite good. Finally, the author adopts a secular, non-Western viewpoint that is quite refreshing and appropriate." [Amazon]

RefTags

Released

1992

Location

Middle East

Setting