A. Hourani; Scholar and Writer on Middle East

Albert Habib Hourani, the Middle East scholar and writer whose “A History of the Arab Peoples” became an international bestseller after the Persian Gulf War, has died. He was 77.

Hourani’s family said he died Sunday in Oxford, where he had lectured from 1958 to 1980, after what they said was a short illness.

Hourani became director in 1958 of Oxford’s Middle East Center, where with fellow historian Elizabeth Monroe he developed a unique collection of papers on the modern Middle East. He remained at Oxford until his retirement in 1980.

He was also a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and at universities in Europe and the Arab world.

Hourani was born into a prosperous Christian Lebanese family that had immigrated to the industrial city of Manchester in northern England.

He was educated in London and at Oxford University and after a spell of teaching at the American University of Beirut, returned to Britain and joined the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in 1939.

The director of studies there was Arnold Toynbee, the famed historian who Hourani said was a profound influence on him.

As the Mideast grew in importance after the founding of Israel, British government officials came to value Hourani’s opinions on the area, particularly the Palestinian refugee issue. In 1946 he testified to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, arguing the Arab case.

The British Mandate in Palestine ended in 1948 with the founding of Israel.

Hourani wrote on a wide variety of Middle Eastern and Islamic themes. His main interests were the impact of Europe on the development of Arab thought and Arab nationalism and the images perceived by Western scholars and travelers in the world of Islam.

He also occasionally wrote about more recent developments, including the Arab-Israeli conflict and war in Lebanon.

His 1962 book, “Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,” which is about Arab nationalism as it developed from 1798 to 1939, and his “A History of the Arab Peoples” have been hailed as classics for students of the Middle East.

“A History of the Arab Peoples,” published in 1991 shortly after the U.S.-led allies drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, reached the bestseller lists in the United States.

Reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times, Edward W. Said, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, called Hourani “today’s leading historian of the modern Middle East” and his book “a masterly summation, the whole story of the Arab peoples.”