Two Great British Historians of the Modern Middle East

Author(s): M. E. Yapp
Source: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 58,
No. 1 (1995), pp. 40-49
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of School of Oriental and African Studies
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 TWO GREAT BRITISH HISTORIANS OF THE
MODERN MIDDLE EAST
By M.E. YAPP
School of Orientaland African Studies, London

As a serious subject of scholarly investigation modern Middle Eastern

history is very young. It was only 50 years ago that the subject began to be
studied by historians who were adequately equipped for the work. Its sub-
sequent rapid progress to the position of respectability which it now occupies
within the discipline of history owes much to the work of a handful of scholars
among whom Albert Hourani and Elie Kedourie were especially conspicuous.
The deaths of these two notable historians should not pass without an acknow-
ledgement of the debt which we owe them and an appreciation of their
contribution to the happy revolution in the branch of history which they
adorned.
Fifty years ago the history of the modern Middle East was written princip-
ally by non-historians. It was written by orientalists, that is to say, by scholars
rooted in classical philology who knew Middle Eastern languages but who did
not know the discipline of history. And it was written by people from various
backgrounds who had encountered the Middle East in the course of their
working lives, often as officials, diplomatists, journalists or missionaries.
Historians contributed not so much to the history of the modern Middle East
as to the history of those diplomatic or military transactions of European
powers which related to the region; one thinks of the work of H. W. V.
Temperley. The product of the work of these various writers was neither
worthless nor negligible; one can still, for example, read the accounts of
contemporary events in Oriente Moderno or in the annual volumes from
Chatham House with profit. But to a young history student coming to the
study of the Middle East from that of Britain and Europe, the dominant
feeling created by this body of writing on the modern history of the region
was one of bewilderment. Sources of very different merits were indifferently
jumbled together to form a narrative: information seemed to be exhibited for
no other reason than that the author had found it: confident assertions were
made for which no adequate evidence existed: improbable assumptions were
laid out as though they had the authority of golden tablets: and, above all,
the questions which an historian should have asked were not asked. The young
student noticed one more odd feature: whereas the motives and behaviour of
Europeans were carefully analysed, those of the people of the Middle East
were rendered in a fashion such as to make their behaviour in the face of what
was usually called the impact of European civilization like that of a number
of different farmyard animals suddenly confronted by a motor car driven into
their midst-some bark, some glare, some sleep and some scatter wildly in
every direction, occasionally throwing themselves under the wheels of the car.
The institutional structures of the modern Middle East were usually omitted
from the analysis or else the reader was left to suppose that they were no
different from those of the classical period. Much was explained in terms of
vague but inexorable forces such as the desire for freedom, nationalism or the
like, and of atavistic reaction.
What was required was the development of a generation of historians who
had a sound basis in the discipline of history, a good knowledge of Middle
Eastern languages and real intellectual ability. Such scholars began to make
 TWO GREAT BRITISH HISTORIANS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST 41

their mark during the 1950s, no doubt greatly assisted by the Scarbrough
initiative, and into the confused intellectual world described above began to
penetrate a few rays of light. One, which happily continues to shine, emanated
from Bernard Lewis, although he was not primarily an historian of the modem
Middle East. At his seminars at SOAS one observed the mind of a trained
historian at work on the problems of Middle Eastern history and in his
Emergence of modern Turkey (London, 1961) he put the right questions to the
available Turkish sources. The other two great sources of light in Britain were
at St. Antony's College Oxford and at the London School of Economics, the
respective academic homes of Albert Hourani and Elie Kedourie. Over the
following 20 years these scholars played a major part in shaping the revolution
in the study of modern Middle Eastern history.
Albert Hourani was born in 1915 in Manchester, whither his father had
come in 1891 from Marjayoun in South Lebanon. Some observers claimed to
discern distinctive Lebanese characteristics in Hourani and asserted that these
served him well amid the academic politicking of Oxford. To me he had the
characteristics of the ideal English gentleman: unfailing good manners, a
familiar range of interests and associations, a strong sense of duty, and sensitiv-
ity to the feelings of others. Newman once wrote that a gentleman was one
who avoided giving pain to others; in this respect Hourani was careful almost
to a fault. He had also a deep reserve. Once, introducing him to an audience,
I made some complimentary remarks about his work. Noticing that he sat
stony faced I changed my style when proposing a vote of thanks at the end of
his lecture and made some mildly amusing but slightly critical observation. He
beamed happily and afterwards said; 'I liked your vote of thanks '. No mention
was made of the introduction. But it may be, as he used to say, that Manchester
and Marjayoun were not so very different;with its cluster of separate commu-
nities at once living together and living apart Manchester was a little like
Lebanon. Perhaps Hourani saw Oxford as also possessing passing similarities:
'that segmentary society without formal and explicit authority,' as he once
described it.
Hourani went to school in London and thence to Magdalen College Oxford,
where he read not history but PPE, in which he gained a first. From 1937 to
1939 he taught at the American University of Beirut. With the outbreak of
war he joined the research department of the Foreign Office and subsequently
was employed in Cairo in the Office of the Minister of State Resident in the
Middle East. In the course of this employment he travelled widely in the region
and formed links which seemed likely to draw him into Arab politics; in his
Palestine diary Richard Crossman suggested that Hourani was the intended
successor to George Antonius as interpreter of the Arabs to the West. But
Hourani preferred to remain an observer of politics: his calling was that of a
scholar and in 1948 he returned to Oxford, first as a Fellow at Magdalen, then
as Lecturer and finally as Reader in the Modern History of the Middle East.
In 1958 he became director of the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies which
was located in St. Antony's College, and there he remained until his retirement.
It was from this academic home, which he had largely created and over which
he presided with such grace, that he exercised his beneficent influence over
modern Arab history through his teaching and his publications.
Probably it was a teacher of graduate students that Hourani made the
greatest and most enduring impact. He had the qualities of a great teacher;
the reserves of knowledge on which to draw freely for the advantage of others,
the ability to inspire with ideas and the willingness to play the part of the
laborious mentor. Above all he had the humility which a teacher needs; to
42 MALCOLM YAPP

know not only when to come forward with advice or exhortation but also
when to remain silent and watch a student develop his own ideas, even to
make his own mistakes. I have yet to meet a student of Hourani who did not
speak of his teacher with admiration and affection.
It is through his publications that Hourani is most widely known. His first
book, Syria and Lebanon (London, 1946), the product of those wartime wan-
derings in the Middle East, established an abiding interest in the region,
demonstrated his lifelong ability to sympathize with everyone concerned, and
also indicated a new approach. In describing the evolution of the newly
independent states, Hourani made the actions of local groups and politicians
comprehensible by placing them not only in the context of new ideas and of
their struggles with outside powers (although in that book he gave pre-eminence
to the clash between Arab nationalism and Western civilization) but also in
the situation of the local communities which had evolved from millets into
minorities through the Ottoman period. Syria and Lebanon, however, was a
halfway house of a book, written at a time when Hourani was caught between
the desire to write an academic study and the wish to help to make policy:
many passages are devoted to prescribing what ought to happen and how
people should behave in the future. Hourani was quick to abandon such
presumption and to confine himself to analysis.
The same subject matter became the seedbed of a most influential article
published in 1968 (' Ottoman reform and the politics of notables') in which,
adapting a concept derived from Max Weber, he developed his perception of
the leaders of these local communities into a most fertile theory subsequently
employed by all who wrote on the political history of the Syrian world and
by many who were concerned with events farther afield. He argued that the
local notables (a'yan) functioned as intermediariesbetween the Ottoman power
and the local communities and developed through this a pattern of political
behaviour based upon bargaining. The introduction of the Ottoman Tanzimat
into Syria with its corollary of more centralized (and also more representative)
government posed new problems and opportunities for the notables and they
evolved a strange relationship with government: they had to co-operate and
they had to oppose. To advance their own interests the notables demanded
more than they wanted, promised more than they could deliver and threatened
more than they could perform. The Ottomans understood this behaviour and
managed to live with it. But the European mandatory powers found it inexplic-
able, declined to behave like the Porte and took the notables at face value,
thereby turning them into something to which they had never in their hearts
aspired, namely, leaders, not intermediaries. Of course, Hourani did not dis-
cover the a'yan, nor was he the first to describe their role as intermediaries or
the ambiguity of their position under the mandates. One thinks especially of
the important work of C. E. Dawn. But Hourani turned a number of separate
and partial perceptions into an elegant and rounded theory of political behavi-
our rooted in historical experience and it is right that it should have been his
name which was especially associated with it. In the Middle Eastern field it
has been as influential a theory as the notion of the rise of the gentry was in
English history.
During the 1950s Hourani was developing another great talent. This was
for explaining the ideas of others more lucidly than they could ever do,
identifying the origins of their ideas, and extracting from those ideas implica-
tions and possibilities of which their authors had probably never dreamed.
This talent was memorably demonstrated one hot summer afternoon in July
1958 at SOAS. It was the last day of a week long conference on Middle Eastern
 TWO GREAT BRITISH HISTORIANS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST 43

historiography. Two long papers, partly because their themes were tangential
to the main purpose of the conference, partly because of the difficulties which
they presented, had been left to the last afternoon, usually a time of brief
discussion, polite thanks and congratulations, and hasty departures to airports.
By a stroke of genius the organizers of the conference asked Hourani to
introduce them. Hourani turned this poisoned chalice into a cornucopoeia of
ideas expressed with such wit, clarity and grace as to charm his somnolescent
audience into an efflorescenceof intellectual activity. The result was a discussion
which, whilst it had little to do with the papers under review, was the intellectual
highlight of the conference. Cyril Philips looked in during the proceedings and
sat down next to me. 'Has the conference all been like this?', he inquired in
a hushed and awed voice.
Hourani's facility for exposition found its finest expression in his Arabic
thought in the liberal age (London, 1962) in which he set out and discussed the
ideas of a number of prominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arab
writers. It was indeed the period when liberalism was the dominant political
ideology and he traced the way in which Arabs sought to adjust its claims to
their own circumstances. The ideas were congenial to Hourani and he was in
sympathy with the aspirations of the writers even when their performance did
not live up to their pretensions. Essentially it was a study in reconciliation;
how men tried in a serious intellectual endeavour to bring into harmony the
claims of Islam and of the rights of man, of Arab nationalism and political
liberty, of science and divine truth. And it was about compromise; it was not
that one set of ideas was right and another wrong-such claims led to a dead-
end of confrontation. What was important was the effort to understand and
to find a middle way. It was and is a great book and it represented the heart
of Hourani's own thought. It was what Hourani thought ought to have
happened in the Middle East after 1945. Hourani loved ideas but he thought
people more important. People must live together and irreconcilable systems
of ideas were obstacles to that process. Of course the book was written at a
time when compromise had fallen out of fashion. Hourani ended his book in
1939 and thereby avoided the distasteful task of expounding new ideas which
were alien to him.
Ideas came from cities where people met and exchanged experiences and
where they were obliged to devise ways of living together. Hourani's interest
in cities found an outlet in a volume which he edited with S. M. Stern in 1970
(The Islamic city) and he was to draw on this study and on his reflections on
the subject in his last great book, A history of the Arab peoples (London, 1991).
In retirement many historians are tempted by publishers and by the last flicker
of ambition to write a synoptic book in which they set out the lessons they
have learned from a lifetime of practising history. Most of them regret it and
Hourani was no exception. 'Why,' he used to complain, 'did I ever agree to
write a big general book. I have nothing new to say.' He was quite wrong.
Incidents, biographies, ideas and themes were blended in an apparently effort-
less narrative which left his readers with a vivid impression of the growth of
Arab communities. It was not the conventional glories of Arab civilization but
the warmth and realities of Arab life which he celebrated; the hopes, fears,
ambitions, successes and failures of individuals, groups and empires; the charm
of houses and gardens; the bustle of the bazaar and the creaking of caravans.
It was a very long way from an older history of the Arabs written in the
traditional dynastic mode, that by Philip Hitti, and I remarked on this contrast
in conversation with him. It was characteristic of Hourani that while acknow-
ledging the difference he expressed his regret that his own treatment of the
44 MALCOLM YAPP

history of the Arabs might be taken as an implied criticism of the work of

Hitti, a man to whom he owed much and for whose work he retained a deal
of respect.
One other feature of his history of the Arabs is revealing of the man.
Writing of the later twentieth century, he confessed to a feeling of unease, an
uncertainty about the direction in which the Arab peoples were moving and
there was evident in his prose a feeling of discomfort. More and more, Hourani
was happier when he looked backwards to a more serene age; the shapeless
struggles of Arab masses and the harsh declamatory style of modern Arab
politicians were uncongenial to him. He talked, lectured and occasionally wrote
about contemporary events but for preference he averted his face from a
spectacle which was distasteful to him and looked back to the years before the
Second World War. When he talked of the most recent past it was often to
find in it resonances of earlier days. He could not ignore the later twentieth
century and did not seek to do so because he believed it to be his duty to
concern himself with it, just as he often made obeisance to the importance of
economic factors in history, but he seemed just as unhappy with the first as
he was uncomfortable with the second.
SOAS may claim some share in Hourani's history of the Arabs for after
his retirement he made the School his academic home and in its turn the
School made him an Honorary Fellow. Many of his friends had thought of
him as a quintessentially Oxford figure-indeed as long ago as 1964 he had
refused to leave Oxford to succeed Sir Hamilton Gibb at Harvard-and fully
expected him to live on in the society he had graced so long. Instead he moved
to London. An attraction was the chance to visit theatres, concerts and exhibi-
tions. One day I met him at the Hayward Gallery just before the end of the
Renoir exhibition. 'Your first visit?', I asked foolishly. He smiled: 'No, my
last.' Another attraction was the Library. 'All the books I need on open
shelves,' he said. And perhaps also there was the opportunity to meet new and
old friends passing through London. In his later years Hourani was a familiar
sight in the Senior Common Room often talking to some young scholar who
had come to seek the advice of the great man. He seemed never to refuse.
Sometimes their books would appear under the imprint of I. B. Tauris. As
academic adviser to that press he helped to make it one of the most discerning
publishers of Middle Eastern books.
Hourani was a man who appeared perfectly balanced: equable, moderate,
liberal, he seemed the epitome of the middle way. And yet the two scholars
whom he most admired were quite different men. One was Louis Massignon,
whom he declared to be the one man of genius who had taken up oriental
studies. Yet Massignon was a man of passion and mystical fervour. The other
was the autocratic Hamilton Gibb who seemed to see the world as black and
white, wholly unlike the eternal grays of Hourani. And yet, among Hourani's
many fine tributes to his contemporaries none is more affecting than that which
celebrates his friendship with Gibb. Hourani also wrote warmly about his old
mentor, Arnold Toynbee, and in his words on Toynbee the same phrases which
he used in writing about Massignon and Gibb recur-he was fascinated by
their strange, haunted and powerful imaginations. It is almost as though,
despite his personal and intellectual commitment to compromise, he was most
drawn to those minds which displayed the opposite characteristics. These small
pieces, which may be found in his four volumes of collected essays, A vision
of history (Beirut, 1961), Europe and the Middle East (London and Basingstoke,
1980), The emergence of the modern Middle East (London and Basingstoke,
1981) and Islam in European thought (Cambridge, 1991), are among Hourani's
 TWO GREAT BRITISH HISTORIANS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST 45

most vivid writings. For the historian, Sir John Kaye once wrote, all men are
dead. For Hourani, one sometimes feels, they were all alive.
Elie Kedourie, who was also an Honorary Fellow of SOAS, had no such
friendly feelings for Hamilton Gibb. In the preface to the 1987 edition of his
England and the Middle East (Boulder, Colorado) he tells the story of his
D. Phil. viva voce examination at Oxford in December 1953, when Gibb was
one of his examiners. Gibb was unhappy with the thesis and declared that
Kedourie had failed to give adequate weight to the importance of broad ideas,
namely, the general oriental awakening and the new ideas of nationalism and
self-determination which flourished at the end of the First World War, or to
the power of public opinion as a constraint on British policy. Kedourie
answered that he had found no trace in the sources that such ideas or the
force of public opinion had played any significant role in the making of policy
and the course of events and asked that Gibb would point to the documents
which would reveal that influence. Gibb could not do so but maintained his
insistence and the result was that Kedourie's thesis was referred. Kedourie
refused to modify his thesis and resubmit and so one of the great formative
works of modern Middle Eastern history never gained the doctoral imprimatur
of Oxford University.
Elie Kedourie was born into the prosperous and long-established Iraqi
Jewish community in January 1926. No event had a more powerful effect on
him than the attack on that community in June 1941 by a Baghdad mob whilst
the government and the British authorities turned a blind eye on the scenes of
murder and pillage. 'A wilderness of tigers' was one of the many memorable
phrases he employed to describe the modern Middle East and much of his
life's work was an attempt to refute more optimistic theories of Middle Eastern
development and to explain how the Middle East had achieved such a dismal
state. He tells in an essay how he was drawn to the subject. Reading Ronald
Storrs's Orientations on a train between London and Oxford, on his way to
an interview for a postgraduate scholarship in 1951, he was struck by the
contrast between the sophisticated political world described by Storrs and 'the
crude corruption, brutality and ideological ranting which was the political
spectacle disclosed to a schoolboy growing up in Baghdad in the 1930s and
1940s'. It was then he decided to write his thesis about the diplomatic transac-
tions which had created the modern Middle East and its new ruling class
during and after the First World War.
Kedourie's early education had been more French than English. He
attended the deservedly renowned Alliance Israelite school in Baghdad before
coming to London in that hot, sunny summer of 1947. Like Hourani he did
not choose to study history but enrolled at the London School of Economics
to read for the BSc. Econ., specializing in political thought and graduating in
1950. In 1951 he joined St. Antony's College. His supervisor was Sir John
Wheeler-Bennett who received him with sherry and a polite invitation to call
and discuss his work when he deemed it necessary. Kedourie did not seek and
Wheeler-Bennett did not offer more assistance and his thesis was written, like
many another at that time, with no more formal guidance than tea once a
term at which supervisor and student talked at large. Kedourie did not find
the style of Oxford academic life congenial-he wrote that he derived most
intellectual enlightenment from the conversation of his fellow postgraduates.
After the debacle of his viva he was happy to return to London where in 1953
he accepted an assistant lectureship in politics and British administration in
the Department of Government at LSE under Michael Oakeshott, whose
conservative mistrust of optimistic theories of human progress was very much
46 MALCOLM YAPP

to Kedourie's taste. Oakeshott was also instrumental in arranging publication

of Kedourie's rejected thesis.
England and the Middle East had a mixed reception when it appeared in
1956. In form it was unusual, resembling as it did a series of articles dealing
with certain aspects of the subject rather than a coherent narrative account of
the development of British policy towards the region. Its argument, however,
was clear: through ignorance, miscalculation and the vanities and prejudices
of some of its agents, Britain had blundered badly, wantonly destroyed the
Ottoman empire, put in its place a hotchpotch of unstable regimes and walked
away from the results. This interpretation ran counter to the prevailing view
which was that Britain had not gone far enough in deferring to the forces of
nationalism in the Middle East and by her selfish policies and postwar arrange-
ments had broken her wartime promises and frustrated the move towards the
creation of a strong Arab federal state. This latter view Kedourie came particu-
larly to associate with Arnold Toynbee and he gave it the name of The Chatham
House Version, 'the shrill and clamant voice of English radicalism, thirsting
with self-accusatory and joyful lamentation'.
The common view of Kedourie's book was that it was clever but essentially
perverse. 'Have you read England and the Middle East?' asked one of my
colleagues, adding, as evidence of the extraordinary waywardness of its opin-
ions, 'Kedourie believes the British Empire was a good thing.' It was
Kedourie's great achievement that during the course of the following 25 years
he converted his sceptical critics to his own views, established the Kedourie
version as the new academic orthodoxy, and became one of the most respected
and admired scholars in the field of modern Middle Eastern history as well as
a man renowned for his distinguished intellectual contribution to much
broader topics.
Kedourie accomplished this historiographical revolution by insistence on
the same principles of historical study with which he had countered the thrusts
of Gibb in 1953. The essence of historical narrative, he asserted, was logic,
chronology and detail. Mastery of detail was the key, and detail required
evidence. The evidence for British policy was in the British archives. It was
not enough to assert that British policy was based upon a broad principle and
point to outcomes as evidence of the truth of this assertion. The connexion
between the broad principle and the policy and the outcome must be shown
by reference to the documents and if it could not be shown, if indeed the
documents pointed to different motivations, then the assertion fell to the
ground. Oddly enough, England and the Middle East was not written from
archival sources, which were not available at the time of Kedourie's research,
but when the Foreign Office archives were opened Kedourie studied them and
in a series of articles began to confirm the hypotheses of his book. Research
students, attracted by his growing reputation (he became Professor of Politics
in 1965) came to LSE and these were also directed towards the archives. What
Kedourie was doing was applying to the Middle East the methods refined by
scholars working in the fields of British and European history and in doing so
he transformed the history of the region. It was no longer possible to get away
with broad assertions and generalizations about principles of policy; detail was
required and in an argument about detail not many scholars would confront
Kedourie. But there was much more than this in Kedourie's feeling for history:
few words capture the humility and the possibilities of the discipline of history
like Kedourie's reference to 'those products of the historian's art...that seek
to restore, for whoever cares to read them, in all its singularity, the meaning
 TWO GREAT BRITISH HISTORIANS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST 47

of thoughts and actions now dead and gone which once upon a time were the
designs and choices of living men.'
Kedourie's contribution was especially to the study of British policy in the
Middle East, although he was also able to use European and American archives
to illuminate features of internal Middle Eastern development. The best of his
articles, like the great essays on Egypt and Palestine, which are contained in
The ChathamHouse version(London, 1970), Arabicpolitical memoirs (London,
1974) and Islam in the Modern World (London, 1980), are archive-based. In
the Anglo-Arab labyrinth(Cambridge, 1976), a study of the Husayn-McMahon
correspondence and its subsequent fate, was also securely founded on a mastery
of the archival sources. The same is also true of many articles in the journal,
Middle Eastern Studies, which he founded with his wife, Syvia Haim, in 1964,
and which quickly became the premier journal in the field of modern Middle
Eastern history. His editorship of this journal not only permitted Kedourie to
publish articles illuminating many areas of the subject but also enabled him
to impose his own high standards on the academic world of Middle Eastern
history.
There was another, quite different aspect of Kedourie's work. This was his
interest in ideas, indeed it was his first interest. Nationalism (London, 1960)
was an important theoretical contribution to the subject. Much previous writing
had concentrated on the practical expressions of nationalism, often assuming
that nation states were such natural political forms that it was of more interest
to explain why they had not always existed rather than why they should have
come into being. Kedourie, by contrast, focused on nationalist ideologies and
their origins, particularly in Germany in the late eighteenth century. Kedourie
argued that nationalism was the artificial creation of intellectuals, although it
was a doctrine which many others found eminently suitable to their purposes.
Taken further this argument yielded a view of nationalism as the product of
manipulation by small groups of men rather than the expression of the popular
will. In his anthology, Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London, 1970), Kedourie
applied this view to the non-European world and concluded that in those
regions even the argument that the doctrine of nationalism, invented or bor-
rowed, was an appropriate ideology for the place and time also failed. In Asia
and Africa nationalism was wholly unsuitable, he declared, and contended that
it was foisted on those continents by intellectuals who uncritically copied
Western ideas.
There is little doubt that Kedourie's hostility to nationalist claims owed
much to his own knowledge of the sufferings inflicted on minorities in the
Middle East by men claiming to act in the name of nationalist doctrines. As
early as 1951, under the pseudonym of Antiochus (the allusion to Racine was
perhaps a reflection of his French education), he had published articles on the
fate of minorities in the region. As time went on he broadened his criticism of
the importation of Western ideas into the Middle East and his last book,
Politics in the Middle East (1992), included a sustained argument that constitu-
tionalism (by which he meant parliamentary democracy) was quite unsuitable
to the region and had failed almost completely. Despotism was the normal
political condition of the Middle East, he contended; and in the past it had
worked not too badly because people understood it and could manage to live
under it. But inappropriate Western ideas such as nationalism and democracy
had deranged the old system without providing a viable alternative; in fact
they had helped to produce the disaster which was the modern Middle East.
Kedourie was a conservative in the profoundly pessimistic tradition which
finds its roots in Plato and in the Old Testament but which in political
48 MALCOLM YAPP

philosophy was best expressed by Thomas Hobbes and Joseph de Maistre.

Optimistic attempts to improve the lot of man by government manipulation
are doomed to failure; the best that can be done is to give people freedom and
the opportunity to follow the precepts of moral teaching. Kedourie was himself
a man of rock-solid principle who had little difficulty in determining what was
right and what was wrong. In this respect he was much more like Gibb than
he recognized. That men performed evil acts Kedourie understood and could
forgive; it was an inevitable outcome of human nature. What he could never
forgive and what he never ceased to castigate was the action of intellectuals in
palliating moral wrongs in the name of some mysterious or fictitious process
or goal. 'It is not the deed but the dirty language,' he remarked at one seminar
on Arab political rhetoric.
Ideologies, in the sense in which the term is usually understood, Kedourie
found distasteful and he condemned those statesmen and officials who, he
believed, based their policies on false assumptions rooted in fanciful theories
of human behaviour and social development rather than on a cool analysis of
the facts. Foreign policy, at least in the Middle East, was best based on a
crude empiricism, but such an approach, he observed sadly, was becoming less
and less fashionable. 'How the pieties that Suez [in 1956] outraged came to
strike root, to flourish and luxuriate, how beautiful souls came to set the tone
in a public life distinguished not so long ago by some robustness and realism,
how scruple decayed into scrupulosity-this remains the central mystery of
modern British politics'.
Kedourie has left a dual imprint on modern Middle Eastern history. On
the one hand he has taught it historical method and on the other he has given
its study a new moral dimension. In his emphasis on morality, however, once
again Kedourie came near to Gibb. For Gibb the history of the modern Middle
East contained an optimistic message; the eventual triumph of the good,
namely, nationalism and democracy: for Kedourie the message is essentially
pessimistic and the story of the modern Middle East is a horror story without
apparent end. Just as Gibb's message was one that people wanted to hear in
the first half of the twentieth century so Kedourie's message, despite his own
pessimism, may be one that people are more ready to accept in the second.
Both messages go beyond the evidence and although Kedourie multiplied detail
in support of his argument, the detail was selected. The virtues of the academic
approach were its critical insights, its scepticism, its readiness to scrutinize far-
fetched theories and unlikely suppositions, its willingness to follow the argu-
ment wherever it led, he wrote. But, sometimes, one feels that Kedourie thought
the enterprise should always end in a condemnation. He could not sympathize
with views and with people he disliked; the only statesman that I can remember
him praising was Lord Salisbury. Kedourie was a man of extraordinary
integrity and frowning moral stature, but he was not a man of intellectual
compromise.
Many found Kedourie an uncomfortable colleague or companion. Partly
this was because he was an intensely private man; Hourani hid his reserve
under a flow of easy conversation but Kedourie's reserve went right up to the
surface. He was always scrupulously polite but often would sit in silence or
offer only diffident comments. Nevertheless, his concentration was complete,
and when he was ready he moved in to dominate a conversation or a discussion.
For what set people in awe of Kedourie was his mastery of detail, his intellectual
power, his moral force, and his remarkable use of language. To see him at
work in a Ph.D. viva was a lesson in historical method, terrifying as it must
have been to the candidate. He would begin with a small question on some
 TWO GREAT BRITISH HISTORIANS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST 49

apparently insignificant detail such as a title or an occupation. There would

follow another larger question which would draw his interlocutor further into
his toils. Then would come the startling and unforeseen implication of his
questions, and finally a thrust at the very heart of the candidate's argument.
It was magnificent but one wondered whether it was a Ph.D. examination, or
an examination on one's fitness to enter the Academy. But perhaps for
Kedourie there was little difference; scholars could do terrible damage, so it
was right that they should be subjected to the severest intellectual tests before
they were pronounced fit to teach others.
Kedourie's prose is one of the greatest delights of his work. The words and
sentences flow, simple and so precise; the argument is developed with what
seems inexorable dispassionate logic. And then, suddenly, there is thrown into
the cold narrative a memorable phrase of passion. The impression is one of
moral authority somehow kept under restraint by rigorous self-control but
occasionally obliged to burst forth because it is demanded by the overwhelming
logic of the exposition. How he developed so powerful a style I know not, nor
what were his models. His prose has an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century
flavour; at times one is reminded of Gibbon, at other times of Bagehot or
even, curiously enough, of Trollope. Perhaps his models were French-there
are hints of Tocqueville, and Kedourie was as widely read in the French classics
as he was in those of England and might well have chosen to write in French.
Nevertheless, his prose seems very English-the most English thing about
him indeed.
He died at the height of his powers. Perhaps he had less to contribute to
Middle Eastern history in the future; his final book on that subject is the one
I shall treasure least. Whereas Hourani made his last book into a triumphant
celebration and enlargement of his lifetime study of Middle Eastern history,
Kedourie's general view of modern Middle Eastern history had little new to
offer and is too unremittingly pessimistic for many tastes. But in his later years
Kedourie was moving increasingly outside the realm of Middle Eastern history
into broader intellectual interests. In particular he was developing a view that
the same follies which distinguished British policy in the Middle East were
coming to dominate the political and social thought of a Western world which
employed guilt and historical process to excuse its abandonment of its primary
responsibilities for the maintenance of order and decency. Some of the products
of these interests found their way into The Crossman confessions (1984).
Another concern was for academic freedom and was illustrated in his writings
on the future of the universities: and yet others in his last public lectures,
notably that at University College on the treason of the intellectuals. At the
time of his death Kedourie was working on a major study of conservatism.
By his early death not only modern Middle Eastern history has lost a bright
source of intellectual illumination.
Of these two great and very different historians, Hourani had the more
perceptive and Kedourie the more powerful mind. In their views of the modern
Middle East, even in their attitudes towards the discipline of history, they were
completely opposed. At seminars which they both attended one looked, how-
ever, in vain, for an heroic intellectual battle; they had too much respect for
each other to engage in a contest for mastery and probably they each realized
that their minds were too unlike to meet with profit. But in their various ways
each made an indelible contribution to modern Middle Eastern history. No
future historian will ever approach the subject without being profoundly affec-
ted, knowingly or unknowingly, by their work. And those who knew them
personally, who admired them and held them in affection, will be aware that
their own lives were enriched by being touched by two men of rare distinction.