STUDIES IN ARAB HISTORY Studies in Arab History The Antonius Lectures, 1978-87 Edited by DEREK HOPWOOD Director of the Middle East Centre St Antony's College, University of Oxford Palgrave Macmillan © St. Antony's College 1990 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-52348-3 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Referenee Division, St. Martin's Press, Ine., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-1-349-20659-9 ISBN 978-1-349-20657-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20657-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data Studies in Arab history: the Antonius leetures, 1978-87/edited by Derek Hopwood p. em. ISBN 978-0-312-04623-1 1. Arab eountries-History. I. Hopwood, Derek. DS37.9.S85 1990 909' .0975927--de20 90-30337 CIP Contents Editor's Preface vii An Introduction by E.C. Hodgkin ix Antonius Lectures 1976 George Makdisi On the Origin and Development of the College in Islam and the West 1 1977 Albert Hourani The Arab Awakening Forty Years Mter 21 1978 Andre Raymond The Ottoman Conquest and the Development of the Great Arab Towns 41 1979 MafMarsot Muhammad Ali and Palmerston 61 1981 Thomas Hodgkin George Antonius, Palestine and the 1930s 77 1982 Magdi Wahba Cairo Memories 103 1983 Harold Beeley Emest Bevin and Palestine 117 1984 Mahmud Manzalaoui Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile: English Fiction and Modem Egypt 131 1985 Oleg Grabar The Meaning of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalern 151 1986 Tarif Khalidi Space, Holiness and Time: Palestine in the Classical Arab Centuries 165 1987 Norman Daniels Orientalism Again 175 To the memory of Katy and George Antonius Editor's Preface The editing of this volume has been made very easy by the willing eooperation of the eontributors, to whom warm thanks. Qnly one lecturer failed to respond and unfortunately his paper has had to be omitted. I would like to thank also Jennifer Baines for typesetting the manuscript and Diane Ring for her help with the proofreading. I am happy to aeknowledge the agreement of Encounter, Macmillan Press and the InternLltionLll JournLll ofTurkish Studies to print the lectures ofMagdi Wahba, Albert Hourani and Andre Raymond. Finally I am most grateful to Alistair Dunean and the World of Islam Festival Trust for its generous support Derek Hopwood Antonius Lectures An Introduction by E.C. Hodgkin FüR many people the Antonius Lecture has become one of the most enjoyable events of the year, more eagerly awaited than Epsom, Wim bledon, Eights Week, or any other of the summer season's fixed points. It is an occasion at which the attender can be certain of enlarging his or her knowledge in a most agreeable fashion, of meeting old friends and making new ones. And now comes this sort of posthumous Festschrift in which eleven of the first twelve lectures find a permanent horne in print. Contributions to some of the Festschrifts I have seen appeared often to have little relevance to the person they were supposed to be honouring. That is far from being the case here. Each lecture is directly relevant to some part of George Antonius's interests - historical, political, literary, topographical, all to do with some aspect of the Middle East, and more particularly with the relations between that area and the West. George, who admired scholarship and enjoyed chat, would have greatly appreciated the chattiness as weIl as the scholarship here displayed. There can be no higher praise than that. In his 1983 lecture Harold Beeley said that he was 'one of the few people in the room who met George Antonius and talked, or more accurately listened, to hirn,' having met hirn during the 1939 St James's conference. I can upstage Harold, having first met George in London in 1934 and got to know hirn weIl in Jerusalem and Cairo in the winter and spring of 1935/36. This was when, having left Oxford, I was travelling in the Middle East, often staying with my brother Thomas, whose chequered career as a colonial servant he described in his 198 lecture and which is reflected also in his I Letters from Palestine 1932-:-36, which I edited and which apppeared in Ig86. In a letter to his mother, written in May 1933, Thomas described George as a man with rather the manner of a young fellow of All Souls and a mysterious profession - travelling expensively round, interviewing Amirs, Sultans, Grand Rabbis and Secretaries of State, and opening all their eyes.' In a letter to me a year later he recalled a meeting we had had with George at the Maison Basque (a very good restaurant in Dover Street, alas no more), during which George had 'talked passionate politics.' Thomas went on: 'He is even more charming he re [Jerusalern] than in England, because in England there are more people rather like hirn, whereas here there are very few - no one that I have ever met that so admirably combines the passion of Introduction the Syrian patriot with the lucidity of the Cambridge don in stating his patriotic beliefs.' There is a subtle Oxford/Cambridge nuance in these two passages which I leave to higher criticism. What I can confirm is that George was splendid company - seldom in my memory passionate, but always lucid. To be a guest at Karm al-Mufti in those days was a rare privilege, as it was later after George had died, an oasis of civilization in the last unhappy years of the mandate. On all occasions it was Katy who showed the guest to what heights hospitality could rise. To speak of that remarkable person in a single pendant sentence seems a crime, but there are, fortunately, so many who have attended these lectures, as she herself also did as long as she was able, who will have their private memories of her that any tribute to her or to Soraya in this context would be otiose. The institution of these lectures was made possible by the generosity of an admirer of George Antonius who has from the outset desired to be anonymous and still wishes to remain so. He will, however, I think be not unaware of the enormous pleasure he has provided for so many over the past thirteen years - a pleasure which can be keenly looked forward to in the years to come. E.C. Hodgkin On the Origin and Development of the College in Islam and the West FEW chapters in the history ofWestern culture are as fascinating as that of the rise and development of universities. These institutions of learning are justly the pride and joy of those who cherish the traditions of Western culture. Such names as Salerno and Bologna, Paris and Montpellier, Oxford and Cambridge, carry a resonance richly deserved, which has not ceased to vibrate in the annals ofWestern civilization, since their early foundations in the Middle Ages. Small wonder, then, that claims on their origins as possibly owing to influence from the Muslim East should be opposed, at tim es politely, more often by simply ignoring the claim. There is no doubt in my mind as to the legitimacy ofsuch opposition. The claims which have been made for the madrasa as the prototype of the university should be regarded as devoid of a sound basis in fact. The idea of the university as it first arose in the West is one which is totally alien to classical Islam. The university in its early his tory is strict1y a product ofWestern Europe in the Middle Ages. Islam borrowed it in modern times, in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his excellent book on The Rise of Universities, Charles Homer Haskins made it clear that the institution was a medieval one, the likes of which had not been seen by Athens or Rome in ancient times.l He did not insist on its European character; he merely took the matter for granted; and this is spite of claims by Islamists placing its origin in Baghdad or Cairo. Haskins was right, irrespective of his awareness of such claims. This fact of the medieval European origin of the university should be kept in mind when speaking of'the rise ofuniversities'. On the other hand, when we speak of the rise of colleges, we are speaking of an institution that is peculiarly Islamic in origin. And there is ample reason to believe that the medieval West borrowed it from Islam. This is what I hope to show in what follows. In a study that seeks to understand institutions of learning from their genesis, it behooves the student first to seek a clarification of the key terms involved. In a comparative study of such institutions in Islam and the West, clarification is nowhere more necessary than in the signification of the basic insitutional terms, 'college' and 'university'. If we were to consider the college and the university as we first find them in Paris in the latter part of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, we would find that there was no ambiguity whatsoever as to the functions of