Hello and welcome to Almanac, the Oxford Middle East Podcast. My name is Matthew Smith.
On today's pod, Charles Owen, I interview Eugene Rogan,
Paul Trash and Marilyn Booth about our journey and his impact on Oxford and the field of Middle Eastern Studies.
I know before we began during the recording, the technical difficulties and unfortunately lost Yuji Dragon's original audio.
So his contributions to the discussion were recorded at a later date and can be heard at the end of this episode.
So today we are joined by Marilyn Guth, professor of Contemporary and World at Modern College at Oxford.
Dr. Paul George, former research fellow in social anthropology at Saint John's College,
and Professor Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle East history at St Anthony's College.
Today we're going to talk about Albert Hourani,
and luckily we had two of his defence students and from what I've heard, one of his biggest fans to talk about it.
So let's just kick it right off to YouTube, Marilyn and Paul.
Tell us a little bit about what Albert was like as a teacher, as a scholar, as a professional colleague, from what you remember.
Well, it was a great privilege to work with Albert, and as he knew at the time,
I wasn't always sure that I was going to see it through and finished my dissertation.
And I think the fact that I did finish it is due to quite a large extent to Albert's encouragement.
He was he was an amazing teacher.
I'm not the first to say this, of course, but he had a way of being very gentle and very encouraging, but at the same time, very compelling.
And I don't want to say he wasn't it was never it never frightening at all.
Always very encouraging. But he had a way of speaking which which as gentle as it was, one knew to take extremely seriously.
So his critics were always praised in a very positive way.
But they really cut to the quick and I learnt so much from him as a student and certainly intellectually, but I think also as a teacher.
I'm also not the first to say this that you know, as one of the outlets, Albert,
I try to emulate him in my teaching, but I can never come up to that model in any way.
But I think his his kindness is something that I definitely always keep in mind and try to emulate as much as I can as a teacher.
Yes, I fully agree. He was a very kind man and very conscientious, a very good supervisor.
So as Marianne said, he looked after people when they were feeling wobbly, which I don't think I ever did.
But you see people around me wobbling quite badly and just very supportive.
But he never impressed his views directly on him, never told me what to do.
And I think it was meant. You ask me in the preliminary question that you said, you know, what were his passions?
Well, his great passion was charity. And he wrote a really excellent Mandarin prose.
He would read cross chapters very, very carefully.
And his criticism was always at the level of the prose.
What do you mean? Is this really what the word you want?
Are you sure you want to say that? Very kind. Very supportive, but very astute.
Mm hmm. And of course, he was immensely, widely read and his style.
Well, he wanted to push you in a certain direction. It was rather. Well, I suppose you probably read some insight, but of course you hadn't.
But you push it down a lot, often measuring very funny, always little nudges.
Very kindly, man. And Nowlin said he was an inspiration.
I mean, there are some of us who've wasted our entire lives trying to emulate Albert because, you know, looking after students.
And he did have a reputation of never letting down the student. I think that's the most important thing.
Can I just add one example? I remember those tutorials with him, especially my first year when I was still kind of finding my way and I would walk up.
I was here at St Anthony's and I would walk up the Woodstock Road, you know, looking forward to the tutorial,
but also somewhat nervous and and also just feeling all the self-doubts that one can so easily feel, I think, as a as a young academic.
And after the tutorial, I would come bouncing back down the Woodstock Road, usually my arms full of books that he had loaned to me.
And again, very much this well, you may have read this, but in case you haven't had a look at it,
you know, and just feeling like this was the best possible place to be in the world.
So he he did have a way of being very encouraging and it was inspiring.
You know, I had a bit of a question connected to that as I'm all about sort of kindness and no, nothing.
It's opinions directly on you. And I know, Roger, I mean, as mentioned,
how he doesn't take that as an identifiable irony school of thought in that being a cohesive set of ideas or approaches towards the Middle East.
But in the sense that he had his approach to Middle East studies and bringing
together a wide range of scholars from different universities and communities.
So do you think that's been his greatest legacy directly on his students?
I think we. Two things.
One, he wrote an excellent Mandarin programme and that's what he encouraged everyone to give if they could manage their clarity,
clarity and calm exposition that really characterised Albert Einstein and then these connexions introducing people to one another.
And I remember it must have been the late eighties. I was at a conference at M.I.T.,
so I suppose the recording probably organised and it was the usual academic
luncheon for just a few people around the table and somebody police II history,
whatever started. The old thing about all the Middle East is characterised by patronage, which I don't either.
And I lost my patience and I said, Well, why don't we go around the table and say why we're here?
And of course, the reasonably were there all but those were albums.
He put people together and he was very good at spotting interesting young people and passing them on to somebody a bit older to say,
look, you might find this person interesting.
And I think Albert built the subject through a lot of letters of recommendation, letters of introduction.
So there's an elegant school, not in the sense of an ideology or a method,
but a certain style and a certain set of connexions, which actually were important.
Some people also. What was his influence on Middle East studies?
Modern Middle East? The answer is he invented it institutionally by introducing people to one another.
He himself was immensely rich, but he really had a knack of spotting, Oh, you might be interested to meet this older person.
You might be interested in this younger person. So you didn't feel you were in a hierarchy.
You just felt you were making people you wouldn't otherwise have met.
Yeah, I agree completely with that, and I certainly benefit from that, from the people he put me in touch with through the years.
I think one thing about Albert is he really he really loved people and he was fascinated by people.
And I think you can see that both in the way that he kind of brought people together, but also in his work.
And it's really interesting that, you know, as he was getting towards the end of his career and even before that, I mean,
history was moving away from the sort of intellectual history focus on individuals
and moving more towards various other kinds of ways of doing ways of doing history.
But I think in a way, in some ways, it has swung back, although not in the same way.
But I think there's now such an interest in people as there should be,
as there must always be at the core of, I think, historical study, you know, micro history and biography.
And we still have in modern Middle East studies,
we have such a need for good biographies and doing good intellectual studies of bodies, of work, of individuals.
And so I think in his emphasis on that, we may be studying other individuals now.
I mean, my work very much looks at the people who were not well known,
whereas of course Albert focussed on the very well known people, but they were also also all part of the same network.
And I think that that that was one emphasis that was, that was quite important.
So both in terms of the networks he created and the way he put people together,
but also in a certain approach to valuing the study of the individual and trying to think through that and to two things to take up there.
Perhaps then one is that the emphasis on intellectual history of a kind never did not it thought out in other areas.
You think of people like Anthony Paxton or, you know, Joe Cocker or whoever in Western European historiography.
So I don't think that ever died. Arrogant thought in the age it's easy to make it seem more a period piece than it really was.
If you put it next, had somebody who looks quite across by for sure.
The other thing I'd love to know about I fully agree, Marilyn, but he had an interest in people.
I would love to know what he grew up reading. I mean, I'm sure we're going to talk about intellectual precursors on global.
But what he made apart from that, he often got the sense that he must have read the whole of Balzac,
Anatole France, you know, all these kind of things. I don't know.
But he certainly did read a lot of novels. You know, he put me on to I was lurid, for example.
So this reading beyond the sort of humane modern culture, I think is very important.
It does turn on an interest in people. What makes it great?
Yeah, absolutely. Be very interesting as well to know for me.
Impossible.
Now, what sort of influence that his previous Presbyterian upbringing had that would have had on what he was reading and, you know, different travels.
It would be very interesting, of course, to look at his problems from that. I mean, George Orwell we know about because he didn't use anything less,
but it was obviously a family of really rather learnt intelligent well-bred people and George Romney stuff is well worth dusting off.
There's a lot of good stuff. It was he believes advice that was that was accessible which one was he was not much worse.
Yeah. I mean, the war up to the next year, you sort of opened the door, Paul,
and you want to learn more about the academic precursors to Albert and Marilyn, if you want to add anything as well.
Obviously, I know the question of what this is really all about, both of you, and what you now write.
Precursors, somebody I do remember him mentioning very favourably many times over the years.
I was Toynbee. Now, he knew what was wrong with joining as well as anybody else did.
But many times he mentioned Toynbee as somebody worth thinking about,
somebody who deserved more thought that he was getting both, which I think that was an approach.
And he comes back in that late piece you gave me.
Yes. Think how do you write Arab history and you've got Middle Eastern history.
You had Toynbee pops up again there.
The point being that history is not just because Albert called him the 70 odd facts or another way and and one damn thing altogether.
It has to be a point to be shaped. And the more immediate approach I suppose is Jim and that collection of Gibbs essay, what was first of all,
his stuff on modern Islamic form, which is a lot closer to Arabic sort of knowledge than people seem to realise.
But also the collection of Gibbs essays that Princeton put together, essays on the civilisation of Islam.
And you look at some of the motifs in there, not just intellectual, but how to organise intellectual life.
And Gibbs pointing out how difficult it is to train, let's say historians,
at least because universities were used to the idea of somebody doing a history and then turning around and say,
Well, I need another four years to get started from Arab. It just didn't fit.
So Jim was arguing with how do you train people? And whether in that essay or another one is very insistent,
we have to get students from the Arab world into Western institutions that they can see how we're doing things,
just as we need to get our young people over there to learn how they do it.
So I think is is.
It's probably not just a matter of liking some of his books and essays is probably a bit of an institutional inspiration that what needs doing.
Listen, there's a tyranny going to actually collaborate with Gib on the final stage of the sort of given battle.
And I remember hearing that something like this there was a quote I heard that close closely there for sure.
And yes, absolutely. I think it's it's just really important to underline what Paul just said about wanting
to get students from the Arab world into and this was another part of his networking.
You know, it was really to be a global network. He was also always very keen to follow French scholarship.
But I remember he would he would suggest to me, you know, knowing that I read French, I mean, he would say, have you read this?
Have we read that? You know, we Anglophone scholars must not ignore what the French scholars are doing.
So he was very, very global in his kind of academic subjects.
What do you both remember the culture of the Middle East centre being like when you both were students?
What was happening around here? What other scholars were milling about with Albert?
Well, I mean, I guess I think more of what what was the student culture like,
but also that it was St Antony's in the Middle East and it was a much smaller place then than it is now.
And so you really did mixed with with the other fellows of the centre.
And so I was also co supervised by myself a better way.
And I worked quite a bit informally with Robert.
So macro, macro sorry to say,
just went out of my head because Robert Metro as an Alexandria native was fascinated by the work that I was doing on another Alexandria native,
a poet that I ended up writing my dissertation on. So, so there was a really quite, very nice informal way in which people did mix.
And here we are sitting in what is now the boardroom and used to be the, you know, the Middle East seminar room.
And in this room, I had my I did my very first academic tour ever as a graduate student.
And I remember I was very, very nervous, but it went well.
And part of the reason I think is that the fellows were just so welcoming.
I mean, you know, Albert really set a tone, but others were that way, too.
So, you know, I remember it was a very positive atmosphere.
I didn't have much to do with the Middle East central. So so I was an anthropologist just around the corner.
And worse than that, I was interested in Yemen, which Albert used to characterise.
Well, the charming is yes, part of the Upper Middle East, the real Middle East, obviously the Cairo, Baghdad and in the 19th century.
And then there were this riffraff out on the military front. So not a lot of difference, literally.
You know, Middle East centre is more a small number of students and Marilynn and I were both young Vikings and Albert put us in
touch with it used to hang out we just hang in here we still are the Middle East centre was not some of it at all.
I think Lawrence Wright Albert did set a tone of civility, politeness,
helping people very calm, didn't Neville Paul Grant You never had to say where I am, right?
Pangea and everybody should listen. Los Angeles Absolutely not.
Very, very rich. Ah, and his virtue shone through was just there.
We had a lucky strike cut off a bit where he got this one from,
I think the Druze or some bunch of people at the back end of Lebanon somewhat and in total sort of somebody going in.
Having explained that, of course, what they did in such circumstances was to talk to the most good man alive.
And he said, One more. How do you know who, Betty. With him in the corner.
That everybody knew. And he didn't have to wear a special hat or anything.
They were so. Yes, yes. Good. And yeah.
Talking about earlier about his influences and the role of Given Toynbee and things.
And one thing that struck me quite a lot is that you touched a bit on this as well earlier, Marilyn, about, you know,
you had a bit of an aversion to more sort of impersonal types on history, which I stress,
like economics will be like social movements and stuff, rather focussing on people.
And I think he has one thing that's come out as well is you seem to have quite a strong idea of historical truth and facts and history,
which I think maybe wasn't wasn't so popular, maybe towards the end of his career anyway that if you had any ideas.
Well, not really, because I think, you know, as Poles already said, I mean, Albert was absolutely not dogmatic in any way.
I mean, it was the opposite of that. And so I don't think I would say maybe a maybe a sort of a value placed on sincerity, I think I would say,
rather than rather than truth with a big capital T in the way that when worked and in the way that one read the works of other people,
yes, we could spend all afternoon hiking around with philosophy.
We did not have a naive idea of the idea to go out and sort of pick up facts like nuggets of rock.
I would be able to say, Look, I know he's a very sophisticated person and whatever that little voice you gave me, it was an interest.
Was it 1991? 91? You know, I'm sorry.
I read that. An awful hurry. Yes.
He ends up playing off sort of impersonal forces, power, wealth and so forth against the importance of the individual.
But he's not coming down on one side or the other.
And it really is a sophisticated view of not just history of the subject, but of human activity and separating individual and society.
And so split normally don't need to make.
And when we do make it, usually we're being clumsy.
Yeah. So Albert, I think was a quiet, almost self-effacing person, but really a very sophisticated character in a lot of these questions.
If you prodded him hard enough, he would have pointed out that they were full propositions.
And what about this scandal of continuity issue with talking about gives influence the sort of generation that they belong to.
It was more towards firstly stressing the Islamic nature of this sort of like the civilisation in the Middle East and then subsequently talking,
stressing how much things changed in the 19th century and 20th century.
Irony realised in Europe as well. But he did have from when he wrote Arabic thought, which May was more influenced by give about period.
You know, he then later on thought that he stressed how things changed.
The European influences on the sort of 19th century make it too much and didn't actually look at
how the continuity of the ways writing and the school of thought in the Middle East that time.
Is this a problem or an issue that you've come up with in your work as well on elements?
And remember, there are various lessons here and then there are both wars and that immediate concern on the Islamic city.
Yes. Yeah. Influenced by they very a lot of newspaper.
But his contribution there is very balanced and he really is quite careful with some things that come up again and again again over hundreds of years.
And there are other things that seems to take to 1832. So I don't think he was ever naive.
But yes, I haven't thought in the liberal age was dealing with a very specific period, a very specific set of people.
Let's not forget, we're almost on moon to the best of all.
It's negative, vulnerable. And then his last one, the big fat book on the history of Arabs.
It was doing a very different job in a very different mode.
And I think if we try to play off the two ends remembers, there are lots of little bits of middle where he doesn't.
Fourth he keeps his. I think part of that, too.
We were talking earlier about his about Albert as a reader from what he reads.
He was a very incisive and sensitive analyst of texts, the way he read texts.
And so this is another way in which he was a very sophisticated thinker and where, you know, I mean,
I ended up working on somebody who's classed as a literary figure, and yet I was approaching it as intellectual history.
And I think he recognised that these were kind of false boundaries.
I think the practical thing of continuity, what I ended up with and I ended up working on things where it was forced on me,
just had sources from I think many answer is you have to look.
It's it's not an empiricist question, but it's a very good question here.
You have to look. Well, if they've been laying out challenge this way for how many centuries will proving give you some sources?
And if they haven't all that much in evidence,
I don't think we can go around scratching broad brushstrokes on them to say Iran is more continuous than Iraq or the Cold War.
Depends what you're looking at. But the fact of continuity is very, very important in where things do stick.
And of course, it happens all over the place and even places that pride themselves on the majority in modern European history.
And you're often into something that a mediaeval big thing.
It's all new. Push the frontier and all the rest. Well, okay, that's all changing.
So why does the title still with a purple shirt?
Why does it appear to be present? You have to look.
You have to look. And Albert was always very careful. Again, the stuff on setting a good place to see him do it.
Marilyn Pine, can you first with this question? Obviously, we're almost three generations on of scholars since Albert.
Now, I guess Charlie. Charlie and I feel very old speaking here.
Charlie and I are probably on generation or generation for I would say, how do you who are some of the greatest cards and they've succeeded.
I would HOURANI And then if I can ask you, I mean, apart from our students.
Yeah, we want to give some person a shot at some of your students. Absolutely.
And if I ask you to speculate a little, what do you think I would think of the field today?
Okay. I'm not going to mention any individual scholars,
because I think what is important is to look at the range of work that is going on and the
way that both the kinds of emphases and foci that that Albert took in his work and then many,
many others are now such a part of the field.
And, you know, as Paul was saying earlier, I mean, this was talking about how Albert actually helped to form a field.
It's easy to forget how new the field of modern Middle East history is.
And so I think to look now at the proliferation of the really amazing kinds of work
that are going on and to sort of try to trace back is is a rewarding thing to do,
but one has to also just appreciate the diversity of work.
What would he think? I think he would I think he would by and large be very pleased.
I think that the way that some of us are trying to work on networks as well and on individuals and bodies of work,
but we are trying to look kind of beyond those better known people and the people he wrote about.
I mean, as Paul said, they weren't necessarily known to the students when when Albert was writing about them,
but certainly in their own time, they were very well known.
So I think some of us are trying to move away from that and to sort of look elsewhere as as Albert himself,
I think was beginning to do towards towards the end of his career.
So I think he would appreciate the different ways that people are approaching, certainly approaching intellectual history,
the way that we can think in very nuanced ways about as he did about the various modes of transmission,
the way that the complicated ways in which ideas and people travel rather than mentioning any particular work.
I would just say that I think in general, there is a sort of wonderful richness of work that I think he would appreciate.
Albert was also very receptive. Two new emerging areas of work.
I mean, he was an early supporter of gender history and looking you know,
he supervised Margaret Bedros thesis on Egyptian feminism, which is going of one of the first really serious works to be done.
And he was very supportive of that.
So I think he would also be pleased to see the way that areas such as gender history and historical translation studies that I work on.
And he was very interested in the way that those in translation studies and translation, it's very,
very important because if you think back to when Albert was formed in this field,
what was there that you could give a non abstract read almost nothing.
And now the range of material available in translation.
And you're about who? Oh, what's that? Magnificent modern.
The library of the New York University Library.
Very magnificent work. It's like low end.
Used to be the tensions. You know, you don't have to be a super sophisticated scholar.
You could have a whole damn thing on your shelf. We're getting much closer to that.
And you have to remember thinking about how little there was to work when you started this.
Paul Yes, it was, Marilyn said. The first thing was just how much stuff and how varied.
And I think it's easy for somebody who's just dumb fellows like you,
just not to appreciate just how little there was and how much could you be sent to read on this.
But just postmark and the things that you would all read now probably think of.
I say stop and think this apply. Why I would. Student Then it's accelerated since then.
So there's just a lot of good stuff out there. It's also a lot more sophisticated.
Yeah, my little patch for anthropology was pretty, pretty poor.
I mean, there are half a dozen things worth reading and they were quite good now and continue work
with sophistication tends to historical density be clever linguistics is just unrecognisable.
So I think anthropology, history, whatever.
Albert would be rather pleased with what's going on.
There's just so many good books, you can't keep up with them. Otherwise, what would he think?
He would be appalled at what has happened to this institution that yes, each person.
Yes. He never expressed strong political views except on one occasion.
I remember what he said. I don't think I ever knew what hatred was, but I'm sure I never hated anybody until Mrs. Thatcher.
And he was the real exception. And of course, the reason hate it was that she had crashed so much of UK academic life,
which was timely and I think the increasing bureaucratisation of universities,
the increase in government pro neo liberal then they would have loathed.
I agree. They really were. Yes, before it. Anti-human and inhumane.
So awful and so going on the topic of great books,
the last thing we like to ask all our podcast guests is What is your favourite book or author on the Middle East?
Oh, what would you. Yeah, what would you recommend to our listeners?
I know it's especially for students of our who I give you so many people that you appreciate
and just in your own career is giving you've come across via maybe not your favourite,
but just one that sticks out in your mind that you can disappear for people again.
Oh goodness. I'm not quite prepared for that question.
Mm. Oh, a book too. I would sort of refuse to answer that.
The reason that Marilyn has just touched on this is a hugely varied divorce, which feels to say, Well, my favourite book on the Middle East.
Yeah, it depends what you're interested in. And to give you to give this answer credit that you're giving.
When Eugene Rogan was interviewed the first time,
he went through all of Albert's books and then a few about probably three or four more books that he liked on top of that.
So he's given he also couldn't pick one book.
One. Well, I would have absolutely resisted doing it.
Depends what you're interested in. Now, there are certainly books I liked very much which were not noticed.
So this will all have lists, things that really are first rate nobody ever gave credit to.
I would stress much more reading outside the Middle East.
You know, I think we've mentioned that Albert was a sophisticated, cultivated, widely read person, and it rather depends what you're doing.
So, you know, I have my little problems trying to get my head around aspects of Yemeni tribalism.
What sort of useful thinking polo can make on Anglo-Saxon?
It's got nothing to do with, but it's good.
And if we're allowed to mention somebody,
my very last research of many generations found very Montgomerie lovely book on domestic labour Morocco that set up and work when
she felt able to self that there was an awful lot here in with saving Jane Austen for Thomas and Mrs. Gaskell at that point.
So we all slog along, you know, we try to master enough of the languages involved,
reading local sources or terribly conscientious, but make it sit up work.
You have to read out some of the stuff you do. And I think that's what my what one of my problems with mentioning something I've been
reading mostly comparatively and especially going back to French Fellowship these days.
And a lot of it doesn't have anything direct to do with the Middle East, but it's it's very relevant to what I do and to the way that I'm thinking.
Any concluding thoughts from other routes? Okay. There's not anything that we thought about for that hour that you want to add before we conclude.
Let's pretend we don't have water here. He's a great friend of both.
I suppose he's third generation. Yeah.
Yeah. So we're all over the place? Mm hmm.
Well, thank you very much. Yeah, I guess the other thing I would say, what you guys should have said earlier,
is that it's also important, I think, to remember that Albert and Odile were a team.
And, you know, Odile was a very, very important part of any student's life.
She was incredibly generous.
And so both in terms of inviting people over, but just being a part of the centre and the two of them together were just amazing.
And talk about sort of networking and remembering people and who's related to whom.
I mean, you get the two of them going at. It would be amazing. I think she you know, she really also deserves mention as a part of that.
The Middle East studies Middle East centre. Right.
And she ran a wonderful, lifelong joke,
pretending to have no idea at all that Syria would use that to the rest of the world, which is the extraordinary.
That seems an awful lot, but I think that's a good double act.
So, yes. Of Marilyn Booth.
Paul Dresch, thank you so much for joining us on moment. Thank you.
And now we talk to Eugene Rose again, who for technical reasons, couldn't complete the interview with Paul and Marilyn.
How is Albert impacted your teaching and your scholarship?
Well, Albert casts a really big shadow over the Middle East generally,
and I think he was responsible for creating a culture that made Oxford, Middle Eastern studies very distinct.
And if I were to summarise it, it was something to do with a level of engagement with the region and a kind of sympathetic commitment.
So all of Albert's students went out to the region, learnt the languages, studied the firsthand, learnt from scholars and practitioners in the region.
You know, if you were an Albert student, you went to Damascus, you got to know everybody, you know,
all the faculty, people in government, people of the press and Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, wherever you went.
That was the approach you took. So, you know, Oxford never succumbed to that no enemy approach to Middle Eastern studies.
We were never interested in the study of terrorists.
We were always interested in what ideologies drove the region rather than what were the ideologies that were a threat to the West.
And, you know, I used to joke and say, that's the approach you want to take.
You go to Princeton. That's the of Louis School that the Gorani School is all about this sympathetic
engagement and approaching the region through its own language and culture.
And in that, I feel like that formula turned out some of the best scholarship, certainly when I was a graduate student at Harvard.
That's what I read. Mm hmm. So reading Derek Hopwood and Roger of my bro and Mustafa Badawi, not to mention Albert himself,
you know, if that's your role model, then that's something to preserve.
And I really feel that now that we're coming into the third generation of Middle Eastern fellows,
that there's still that commitment to approach the region in that way and this sort of very strong, positive commitment to the region we work on.
We like the place we work on, you know, and I traced that right back to our.
And I found in my when I was doing my research for this, I found a mention,
I think it was in Roger Owen's introduction to Arabic thought beyond reproach.
There was a mention of sort of how its work in Palestine just after the war when he was associated with the Arab office in Jerusalem.
I wonder if you could shed any more light on that. He knew much about it.
You know, I only have kind of vignettes about that.
I know that Albert had teamed up with Mussolini to try and make the case, particularly to the Anglo-American committee.
For Palestinian national rights against what was a growing tide of support in favour of Jewish rights in Palestine.
And to alleviate this was a false relativism.
And there was an absolute case for Palestinian national claims and that these were being ignored out
of the very legitimate concern for Jewish interests and rights in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
But he felt that Palestinian interests were falling out in the process.
The thing that Albert said to me was that he felt that he was very ineffectual at engaging politically.
I think it was something that he and other me went into feeling like the argument was theirs to lose and they lost.
And I think he came away from that bruised and felt that he would retire from any political engagement to try and make his contribution
through scholarship and through training the next generation of people who would then go and try and tackle the political issues of the day.
But there is quite a lot of documentation in the UK National Archives from
that period of negotiating the future of Palestine at the end of the mandate.
You'll find a lot of papers and reports either by Albert or referencing him.
And I don't think it's been fully done yet.
And I would I would love to see someone do that. And on the podcast, he always asks, What's your favourite book?
But you've done that question already, so why don't you tell us a little bit about the new book coming out?
Oh, and the new book is So Albertine. So it kind of fits in well here.
While I was doing my doctoral research, I went to the American Archives.
Everywhere I'd been to the British and French archives.
If you wanted to approach Transjordan, you did so either through constant reports of Damascus or from Jerusalem.
And America had consuls in both places. They started in the 1850s in Jerusalem, appointed an American as consul general there,
and they hired in Damascus a local intellectual, very famous local intellectual named behind me, Shaka.
And he shaka's best known to historians for the history of Lebanon in Syria in the 1980, the 19th century,
which he called in Arabic and Gelb I looked it up and that or the response to the suggestion of the beloved,
but which in Wheeler Thaksin's translation became murder, mayhem, pillage, plunder.
It's a really great primary source for that period.
And this was the man that America hired to be their first consular vice consul in Damascus in 1859, the following year.
Damascus it comes to a massive genocidal moment where a muslim of.
Tries to exterminate the Christian community of Damascus.
And so Michalka was an eyewitness to the before the during and the after.
The Damascus massacre has been very well studied by all the great historians of Albert's generation.
And a lot of the texts from that era were published around that time.
But I'm actually more interested in looking at the process of reconstruction and reintegration,
because what's so interesting to me is how Damascus came through that dreadful experience driven to the brink of genocide.
You know, if they could have the mob would have killed all the Christian men in the event.
Intervention by people like the Amir Abdul Khadr from Algeria, who was in exile in Damascus with a large group of armed men, was able to save.
But 85% of the Christian communities. You had a genocidal moment, but not a genocide.
But how do you get the Christians to come back to the city and live amongst those neighbours that so recently had tried
to murder them and rebuild their houses and relaunch the project of Damascus in a way that's not a zero sum game,
but where benefits are distributed to all communities so that you could rebuild and reintegrate without a sectarian legacy.
And so to me, it's almost the aftermath, which is the more important part of the story.
And I think that's where I'll be able to add something from the sources I found.
He's very rich reports. And Shakur was filing weekly to Beirut on the conditions in Damascus,
supplemented by some wonderful manuscript sources in Arabic by various Muslims who lived through the same period.
And then, of course, all the published manuscripts that have been part of the literature on this for, you know, a half century or more.
So very rich material, very interesting topics.
And as I said, one which was very, very dear to Albert's own heart and very much at the heart of his kind of
urban notables in Arab nationalism sort of approach to politics and notables.
So hope to have a manuscript done by the end of the summer.
And as I returned in the autumn to full time teaching duties that we can put that one into production.
Wonderful. Yeah, they really are strong. No, I'm not saying it is so much.
It's such a pleasure, guys.