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Hello and welcome to Almanac, the Oxford Middle East Podcast. My name is Matthew Smith.

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On today's pod, Charles Owen, I interview Eugene Rogan,

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Paul Trash and Marilyn Booth about our journey and his impact on Oxford and the field of Middle Eastern Studies.

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I know before we began during the recording, the technical difficulties and unfortunately lost Yuji Dragon's original audio.

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So his contributions to the discussion were recorded at a later date and can be heard at the end of this episode.

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So today we are joined by Marilyn Guth, professor of Contemporary and World at Modern College at Oxford.

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Dr. Paul George, former research fellow in social anthropology at Saint John's College,

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and Professor Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle East history at St Anthony's College.

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Today we're going to talk about Albert Hourani,

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and luckily we had two of his defence students and from what I've heard, one of his biggest fans to talk about it.

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So let's just kick it right off to YouTube, Marilyn and Paul.

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Tell us a little bit about what Albert was like as a teacher, as a scholar, as a professional colleague, from what you remember.

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Well, it was a great privilege to work with Albert, and as he knew at the time,

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I wasn't always sure that I was going to see it through and finished my dissertation.

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And I think the fact that I did finish it is due to quite a large extent to Albert's encouragement.

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He was he was an amazing teacher.

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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.

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And I don't want to say he wasn't it was never it never frightening at all.

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Always very encouraging. But he had a way of speaking which which as gentle as it was, one knew to take extremely seriously.

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So his critics were always praised in a very positive way.

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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.

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I'm also not the first to say this that you know, as one of the outlets, Albert,

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I try to emulate him in my teaching, but I can never come up to that model in any way.

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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.

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Yes, I fully agree. He was a very kind man and very conscientious, a very good supervisor.

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So as Marianne said, he looked after people when they were feeling wobbly, which I don't think I ever did.

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But you see people around me wobbling quite badly and just very supportive.

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But he never impressed his views directly on him, never told me what to do.

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And I think it was meant. You ask me in the preliminary question that you said, you know, what were his passions?

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Well, his great passion was charity. And he wrote a really excellent Mandarin prose.

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He would read cross chapters very, very carefully.

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And his criticism was always at the level of the prose.

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What do you mean? Is this really what the word you want?

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Are you sure you want to say that? Very kind. Very supportive, but very astute.

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Mm hmm. And of course, he was immensely, widely read and his style.

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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.

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But you push it down a lot, often measuring very funny, always little nudges.

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Very kindly, man. And Nowlin said he was an inspiration.

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I mean, there are some of us who've wasted our entire lives trying to emulate Albert because, you know, looking after students.

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And he did have a reputation of never letting down the student. I think that's the most important thing.

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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.

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I was here at St Anthony's and I would walk up the Woodstock Road, you know, looking forward to the tutorial,

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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.

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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.

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And again, very much this well, you may have read this, but in case you haven't had a look at it,

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you know, and just feeling like this was the best possible place to be in the world.

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So he he did have a way of being very encouraging and it was inspiring.

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You know, I had a bit of a question connected to that as I'm all about sort of kindness and no, nothing.

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It's opinions directly on you. And I know, Roger, I mean, as mentioned,

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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.

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But in the sense that he had his approach to Middle East studies and bringing

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together a wide range of scholars from different universities and communities.

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So do you think that's been his greatest legacy directly on his students?

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I think we. Two things.

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One, he wrote an excellent Mandarin programme and that's what he encouraged everyone to give if they could manage their clarity,

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clarity and calm exposition that really characterised Albert Einstein and then these connexions introducing people to one another.

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And I remember it must have been the late eighties. I was at a conference at M.I.T.,

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so I suppose the recording probably organised and it was the usual academic

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luncheon for just a few people around the table and somebody police II history,

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whatever started. The old thing about all the Middle East is characterised by patronage, which I don't either.

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And I lost my patience and I said, Well, why don't we go around the table and say why we're here?

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And of course, the reasonably were there all but those were albums.

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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,

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look, you might find this person interesting.

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And I think Albert built the subject through a lot of letters of recommendation, letters of introduction.

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So there's an elegant school, not in the sense of an ideology or a method,

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but a certain style and a certain set of connexions, which actually were important.

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Some people also. What was his influence on Middle East studies?

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Modern Middle East? The answer is he invented it institutionally by introducing people to one another.

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He himself was immensely rich, but he really had a knack of spotting, Oh, you might be interested to meet this older person.

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You might be interested in this younger person. So you didn't feel you were in a hierarchy.

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You just felt you were making people you wouldn't otherwise have met.

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Yeah, I agree completely with that, and I certainly benefit from that, from the people he put me in touch with through the years.

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I think one thing about Albert is he really he really loved people and he was fascinated by people.

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And I think you can see that both in the way that he kind of brought people together, but also in his work.

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And it's really interesting that, you know, as he was getting towards the end of his career and even before that, I mean,

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history was moving away from the sort of intellectual history focus on individuals

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and moving more towards various other kinds of ways of doing ways of doing history.

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But I think in a way, in some ways, it has swung back, although not in the same way.

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But I think there's now such an interest in people as there should be,

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as there must always be at the core of, I think, historical study, you know, micro history and biography.

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And we still have in modern Middle East studies,

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we have such a need for good biographies and doing good intellectual studies of bodies, of work, of individuals.

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And so I think in his emphasis on that, we may be studying other individuals now.

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I mean, my work very much looks at the people who were not well known,

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whereas of course Albert focussed on the very well known people, but they were also also all part of the same network.

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And I think that that that was one emphasis that was, that was quite important.

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So both in terms of the networks he created and the way he put people together,

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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.

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Perhaps then one is that the emphasis on intellectual history of a kind never did not it thought out in other areas.

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You think of people like Anthony Paxton or, you know, Joe Cocker or whoever in Western European historiography.

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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.

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If you put it next, had somebody who looks quite across by for sure.

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The other thing I'd love to know about I fully agree, Marilyn, but he had an interest in people.

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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.

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But what he made apart from that, he often got the sense that he must have read the whole of Balzac,

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Anatole France, you know, all these kind of things. I don't know.

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But he certainly did read a lot of novels. You know, he put me on to I was lurid, for example.

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So this reading beyond the sort of humane modern culture, I think is very important.

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It does turn on an interest in people. What makes it great?

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Yeah, absolutely. Be very interesting as well to know for me.

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Impossible.

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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.

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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,

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but it was obviously a family of really rather learnt intelligent well-bred people and George Romney stuff is well worth dusting off.

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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.

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Yeah. I mean, the war up to the next year, you sort of opened the door, Paul,

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and you want to learn more about the academic precursors to Albert and Marilyn, if you want to add anything as well.

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Obviously, I know the question of what this is really all about, both of you, and what you now write.

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Precursors, somebody I do remember him mentioning very favourably many times over the years.

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I was Toynbee. Now, he knew what was wrong with joining as well as anybody else did.

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But many times he mentioned Toynbee as somebody worth thinking about,

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somebody who deserved more thought that he was getting both, which I think that was an approach.

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And he comes back in that late piece you gave me.

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Yes. Think how do you write Arab history and you've got Middle Eastern history.

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You had Toynbee pops up again there.

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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.

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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,

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his stuff on modern Islamic form, which is a lot closer to Arabic sort of knowledge than people seem to realise.

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But also the collection of Gibbs essays that Princeton put together, essays on the civilisation of Islam.

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And you look at some of the motifs in there, not just intellectual, but how to organise intellectual life.

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And Gibbs pointing out how difficult it is to train, let's say historians,

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at least because universities were used to the idea of somebody doing a history and then turning around and say,

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Well, I need another four years to get started from Arab. It just didn't fit.

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So Jim was arguing with how do you train people? And whether in that essay or another one is very insistent,

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we have to get students from the Arab world into Western institutions that they can see how we're doing things,

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just as we need to get our young people over there to learn how they do it.

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So I think is is.

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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.

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Listen, there's a tyranny going to actually collaborate with Gib on the final stage of the sort of given battle.

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And I remember hearing that something like this there was a quote I heard that close closely there for sure.

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And yes, absolutely. I think it's it's just really important to underline what Paul just said about wanting

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to get students from the Arab world into and this was another part of his networking.

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You know, it was really to be a global network. He was also always very keen to follow French scholarship.

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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?

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Have we read that? You know, we Anglophone scholars must not ignore what the French scholars are doing.

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So he was very, very global in his kind of academic subjects.

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What do you both remember the culture of the Middle East centre being like when you both were students?

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What was happening around here? What other scholars were milling about with Albert?

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Well, I mean, I guess I think more of what what was the student culture like,

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but also that it was St Antony's in the Middle East and it was a much smaller place then than it is now.

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And so you really did mixed with with the other fellows of the centre.

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And so I was also co supervised by myself a better way.

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And I worked quite a bit informally with Robert.

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So macro, macro sorry to say,

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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,

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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.

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And here we are sitting in what is now the boardroom and used to be the, you know, the Middle East seminar room.

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And in this room, I had my I did my very first academic tour ever as a graduate student.

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And I remember I was very, very nervous, but it went well.

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And part of the reason I think is that the fellows were just so welcoming.

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I mean, you know, Albert really set a tone, but others were that way, too.

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So, you know, I remember it was a very positive atmosphere.

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I didn't have much to do with the Middle East central. So so I was an anthropologist just around the corner.

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And worse than that, I was interested in Yemen, which Albert used to characterise.

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Well, the charming is yes, part of the Upper Middle East, the real Middle East, obviously the Cairo, Baghdad and in the 19th century.

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And then there were this riffraff out on the military front. So not a lot of difference, literally.

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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

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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.

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I think Lawrence Wright Albert did set a tone of civility, politeness,

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helping people very calm, didn't Neville Paul Grant You never had to say where I am, right?

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Pangea and everybody should listen. Los Angeles Absolutely not.

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Very, very rich. Ah, and his virtue shone through was just there.

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We had a lucky strike cut off a bit where he got this one from,

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I think the Druze or some bunch of people at the back end of Lebanon somewhat and in total sort of somebody going in.

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Having explained that, of course, what they did in such circumstances was to talk to the most good man alive.

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And he said, One more. How do you know who, Betty. With him in the corner.

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That everybody knew. And he didn't have to wear a special hat or anything.

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They were so. Yes, yes. Good. And yeah.

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Talking about earlier about his influences and the role of Given Toynbee and things.

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And one thing that struck me quite a lot is that you touched a bit on this as well earlier, Marilyn, about, you know,

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you had a bit of an aversion to more sort of impersonal types on history, which I stress,

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like economics will be like social movements and stuff, rather focussing on people.

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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,

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which I think maybe wasn't wasn't so popular, maybe towards the end of his career anyway that if you had any ideas.

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Well, not really, because I think, you know, as Poles already said, I mean, Albert was absolutely not dogmatic in any way.

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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,

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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,

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yes, we could spend all afternoon hiking around with philosophy.

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We did not have a naive idea of the idea to go out and sort of pick up facts like nuggets of rock.

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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.

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Was it 1991? 91? You know, I'm sorry.

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I read that. An awful hurry. Yes.

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He ends up playing off sort of impersonal forces, power, wealth and so forth against the importance of the individual.

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But he's not coming down on one side or the other.

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And it really is a sophisticated view of not just history of the subject, but of human activity and separating individual and society.

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And so split normally don't need to make.

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And when we do make it, usually we're being clumsy.

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Yeah. So Albert, I think was a quiet, almost self-effacing person, but really a very sophisticated character in a lot of these questions.

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If you prodded him hard enough, he would have pointed out that they were full propositions.

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And what about this scandal of continuity issue with talking about gives influence the sort of generation that they belong to.

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It was more towards firstly stressing the Islamic nature of this sort of like the civilisation in the Middle East and then subsequently talking,

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stressing how much things changed in the 19th century and 20th century.

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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.

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You know, he then later on thought that he stressed how things changed.

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The European influences on the sort of 19th century make it too much and didn't actually look at

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how the continuity of the ways writing and the school of thought in the Middle East that time.

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Is this a problem or an issue that you've come up with in your work as well on elements?

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And remember, there are various lessons here and then there are both wars and that immediate concern on the Islamic city.

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Yes. Yeah. Influenced by they very a lot of newspaper.

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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.

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And there are other things that seems to take to 1832. So I don't think he was ever naive.

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But yes, I haven't thought in the liberal age was dealing with a very specific period, a very specific set of people.

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Let's not forget, we're almost on moon to the best of all.

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It's negative, vulnerable. And then his last one, the big fat book on the history of Arabs.

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It was doing a very different job in a very different mode.

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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.

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Fourth he keeps his. I think part of that, too.

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We were talking earlier about his about Albert as a reader from what he reads.

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He was a very incisive and sensitive analyst of texts, the way he read texts.

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And so this is another way in which he was a very sophisticated thinker and where, you know, I mean,

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I ended up working on somebody who's classed as a literary figure, and yet I was approaching it as intellectual history.

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And I think he recognised that these were kind of false boundaries.

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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,

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just had sources from I think many answer is you have to look.

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It's it's not an empiricist question, but it's a very good question here.

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You have to look. Well, if they've been laying out challenge this way for how many centuries will proving give you some sources?

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And if they haven't all that much in evidence,

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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.

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Depends what you're looking at. But the fact of continuity is very, very important in where things do stick.

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And of course, it happens all over the place and even places that pride themselves on the majority in modern European history.

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And you're often into something that a mediaeval big thing.

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It's all new. Push the frontier and all the rest. Well, okay, that's all changing.

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So why does the title still with a purple shirt?

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Why does it appear to be present? You have to look.

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You have to look. And Albert was always very careful. Again, the stuff on setting a good place to see him do it.

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Marilyn Pine, can you first with this question? Obviously, we're almost three generations on of scholars since Albert.

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Now, I guess Charlie. Charlie and I feel very old speaking here.

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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.

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I would HOURANI And then if I can ask you, I mean, apart from our students.

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Yeah, we want to give some person a shot at some of your students. Absolutely.

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And if I ask you to speculate a little, what do you think I would think of the field today?

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Okay. I'm not going to mention any individual scholars,

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because I think what is important is to look at the range of work that is going on and the

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way that both the kinds of emphases and foci that that Albert took in his work and then many,

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many others are now such a part of the field.

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And, you know, as Paul was saying earlier, I mean, this was talking about how Albert actually helped to form a field.

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It's easy to forget how new the field of modern Middle East history is.

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And so I think to look now at the proliferation of the really amazing kinds of work

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that are going on and to sort of try to trace back is is a rewarding thing to do,

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but one has to also just appreciate the diversity of work.

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What would he think? I think he would I think he would by and large be very pleased.

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I think that the way that some of us are trying to work on networks as well and on individuals and bodies of work,

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but we are trying to look kind of beyond those better known people and the people he wrote about.

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I mean, as Paul said, they weren't necessarily known to the students when when Albert was writing about them,

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but certainly in their own time, they were very well known.

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So I think some of us are trying to move away from that and to sort of look elsewhere as as Albert himself,

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I think was beginning to do towards towards the end of his career.

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So I think he would appreciate the different ways that people are approaching, certainly approaching intellectual history,

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the way that we can think in very nuanced ways about as he did about the various modes of transmission,

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the way that the complicated ways in which ideas and people travel rather than mentioning any particular work.

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I would just say that I think in general, there is a sort of wonderful richness of work that I think he would appreciate.

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Albert was also very receptive. Two new emerging areas of work.

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I mean, he was an early supporter of gender history and looking you know,

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he supervised Margaret Bedros thesis on Egyptian feminism, which is going of one of the first really serious works to be done.

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And he was very supportive of that.

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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.

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And he was very interested in the way that those in translation studies and translation, it's very,

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very important because if you think back to when Albert was formed in this field,

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what was there that you could give a non abstract read almost nothing.

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And now the range of material available in translation.

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And you're about who? Oh, what's that? Magnificent modern.

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The library of the New York University Library.

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Very magnificent work. It's like low end.

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Used to be the tensions. You know, you don't have to be a super sophisticated scholar.

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You could have a whole damn thing on your shelf. We're getting much closer to that.

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And you have to remember thinking about how little there was to work when you started this.

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Paul Yes, it was, Marilyn said. The first thing was just how much stuff and how varied.

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And I think it's easy for somebody who's just dumb fellows like you,

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just not to appreciate just how little there was and how much could you be sent to read on this.

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But just postmark and the things that you would all read now probably think of.

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I say stop and think this apply. Why I would. Student Then it's accelerated since then.

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So there's just a lot of good stuff out there. It's also a lot more sophisticated.

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Yeah, my little patch for anthropology was pretty, pretty poor.

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I mean, there are half a dozen things worth reading and they were quite good now and continue work

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with sophistication tends to historical density be clever linguistics is just unrecognisable.

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So I think anthropology, history, whatever.

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Albert would be rather pleased with what's going on.

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There's just so many good books, you can't keep up with them. Otherwise, what would he think?

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He would be appalled at what has happened to this institution that yes, each person.

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Yes. He never expressed strong political views except on one occasion.

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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.

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And he was the real exception. And of course, the reason hate it was that she had crashed so much of UK academic life,

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which was timely and I think the increasing bureaucratisation of universities,

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the increase in government pro neo liberal then they would have loathed.

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I agree. They really were. Yes, before it. Anti-human and inhumane.

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So awful and so going on the topic of great books,

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the last thing we like to ask all our podcast guests is What is your favourite book or author on the Middle East?

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Oh, what would you. Yeah, what would you recommend to our listeners?

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I know it's especially for students of our who I give you so many people that you appreciate

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and just in your own career is giving you've come across via maybe not your favourite,

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but just one that sticks out in your mind that you can disappear for people again.

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Oh goodness. I'm not quite prepared for that question.

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Mm. Oh, a book too. I would sort of refuse to answer that.

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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.

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Yeah, it depends what you're interested in. And to give you to give this answer credit that you're giving.

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When Eugene Rogan was interviewed the first time,

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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.

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So he's given he also couldn't pick one book.

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One. Well, I would have absolutely resisted doing it.

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Depends what you're interested in. Now, there are certainly books I liked very much which were not noticed.

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So this will all have lists, things that really are first rate nobody ever gave credit to.

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I would stress much more reading outside the Middle East.

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You know, I think we've mentioned that Albert was a sophisticated, cultivated, widely read person, and it rather depends what you're doing.

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So, you know, I have my little problems trying to get my head around aspects of Yemeni tribalism.

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What sort of useful thinking polo can make on Anglo-Saxon?

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It's got nothing to do with, but it's good.

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And if we're allowed to mention somebody,

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my very last research of many generations found very Montgomerie lovely book on domestic labour Morocco that set up and work when

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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.

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So we all slog along, you know, we try to master enough of the languages involved,

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reading local sources or terribly conscientious, but make it sit up work.

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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

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reading mostly comparatively and especially going back to French Fellowship these days.

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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.

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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.

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Let's pretend we don't have water here. He's a great friend of both.

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I suppose he's third generation. Yeah.

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Yeah. So we're all over the place? Mm hmm.

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Well, thank you very much. Yeah, I guess the other thing I would say, what you guys should have said earlier,

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is that it's also important, I think, to remember that Albert and Odile were a team.

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And, you know, Odile was a very, very important part of any student's life.

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She was incredibly generous.

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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.

325
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And talk about sort of networking and remembering people and who's related to whom.

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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.

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The Middle East studies Middle East centre. Right.

328
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And she ran a wonderful, lifelong joke,

329
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pretending to have no idea at all that Syria would use that to the rest of the world, which is the extraordinary.

330
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That seems an awful lot, but I think that's a good double act.

331
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So, yes. Of Marilyn Booth.

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Paul Dresch, thank you so much for joining us on moment. Thank you.

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And now we talk to Eugene Rose again, who for technical reasons, couldn't complete the interview with Paul and Marilyn.

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How is Albert impacted your teaching and your scholarship?

335
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Well, Albert casts a really big shadow over the Middle East generally,

336
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and I think he was responsible for creating a culture that made Oxford, Middle Eastern studies very distinct.

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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.

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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.

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You know, if you were an Albert student, you went to Damascus, you got to know everybody, you know,

340
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all the faculty, people in government, people of the press and Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, wherever you went.

341
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That was the approach you took. So, you know, Oxford never succumbed to that no enemy approach to Middle Eastern studies.

342
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We were never interested in the study of terrorists.

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We were always interested in what ideologies drove the region rather than what were the ideologies that were a threat to the West.

344
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And, you know, I used to joke and say, that's the approach you want to take.

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You go to Princeton. That's the of Louis School that the Gorani School is all about this sympathetic

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engagement and approaching the region through its own language and culture.

347
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And in that, I feel like that formula turned out some of the best scholarship, certainly when I was a graduate student at Harvard.

348
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That's what I read. Mm hmm. So reading Derek Hopwood and Roger of my bro and Mustafa Badawi, not to mention Albert himself,

349
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you know, if that's your role model, then that's something to preserve.

350
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And I really feel that now that we're coming into the third generation of Middle Eastern fellows,

351
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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.

352
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We like the place we work on, you know, and I traced that right back to our.

353
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And I found in my when I was doing my research for this, I found a mention,

354
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I think it was in Roger Owen's introduction to Arabic thought beyond reproach.

355
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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.

356
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I wonder if you could shed any more light on that. He knew much about it.

357
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You know, I only have kind of vignettes about that.

358
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I know that Albert had teamed up with Mussolini to try and make the case, particularly to the Anglo-American committee.

359
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For Palestinian national rights against what was a growing tide of support in favour of Jewish rights in Palestine.

360
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And to alleviate this was a false relativism.

361
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And there was an absolute case for Palestinian national claims and that these were being ignored out

362
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of the very legitimate concern for Jewish interests and rights in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

363
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But he felt that Palestinian interests were falling out in the process.

364
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The thing that Albert said to me was that he felt that he was very ineffectual at engaging politically.

365
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I think it was something that he and other me went into feeling like the argument was theirs to lose and they lost.

366
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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

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through scholarship and through training the next generation of people who would then go and try and tackle the political issues of the day.

368
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But there is quite a lot of documentation in the UK National Archives from

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that period of negotiating the future of Palestine at the end of the mandate.

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You'll find a lot of papers and reports either by Albert or referencing him.

371
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And I don't think it's been fully done yet.

372
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And I would I would love to see someone do that. And on the podcast, he always asks, What's your favourite book?

373
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But you've done that question already, so why don't you tell us a little bit about the new book coming out?

374
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Oh, and the new book is So Albertine. So it kind of fits in well here.

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While I was doing my doctoral research, I went to the American Archives.

376
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Everywhere I'd been to the British and French archives.

377
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If you wanted to approach Transjordan, you did so either through constant reports of Damascus or from Jerusalem.

378
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And America had consuls in both places. They started in the 1850s in Jerusalem, appointed an American as consul general there,

379
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and they hired in Damascus a local intellectual, very famous local intellectual named behind me, Shaka.

380
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And he shaka's best known to historians for the history of Lebanon in Syria in the 1980, the 19th century,

381
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which he called in Arabic and Gelb I looked it up and that or the response to the suggestion of the beloved,

382
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but which in Wheeler Thaksin's translation became murder, mayhem, pillage, plunder.

383
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It's a really great primary source for that period.

384
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And this was the man that America hired to be their first consular vice consul in Damascus in 1859, the following year.

385
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Damascus it comes to a massive genocidal moment where a muslim of.

386
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Tries to exterminate the Christian community of Damascus.

387
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And so Michalka was an eyewitness to the before the during and the after.

388
00:40:47,690 --> 00:40:54,320
The Damascus massacre has been very well studied by all the great historians of Albert's generation.

389
00:40:55,070 --> 00:40:58,250
And a lot of the texts from that era were published around that time.

390
00:40:59,560 --> 00:41:05,220
But I'm actually more interested in looking at the process of reconstruction and reintegration,

391
00:41:05,230 --> 00:41:12,010
because what's so interesting to me is how Damascus came through that dreadful experience driven to the brink of genocide.

392
00:41:12,440 --> 00:41:16,570
You know, if they could have the mob would have killed all the Christian men in the event.

393
00:41:17,170 --> 00:41:24,909
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.

394
00:41:24,910 --> 00:41:29,620
But 85% of the Christian communities. You had a genocidal moment, but not a genocide.

395
00:41:30,370 --> 00:41:39,159
But how do you get the Christians to come back to the city and live amongst those neighbours that so recently had tried

396
00:41:39,160 --> 00:41:47,140
to murder them and rebuild their houses and relaunch the project of Damascus in a way that's not a zero sum game,

397
00:41:47,530 --> 00:41:54,430
but where benefits are distributed to all communities so that you could rebuild and reintegrate without a sectarian legacy.

398
00:41:54,910 --> 00:42:00,370
And so to me, it's almost the aftermath, which is the more important part of the story.

399
00:42:00,370 --> 00:42:03,490
And I think that's where I'll be able to add something from the sources I found.

400
00:42:03,760 --> 00:42:09,730
He's very rich reports. And Shakur was filing weekly to Beirut on the conditions in Damascus,

401
00:42:10,480 --> 00:42:19,310
supplemented by some wonderful manuscript sources in Arabic by various Muslims who lived through the same period.

402
00:42:19,930 --> 00:42:27,850
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.

403
00:42:28,300 --> 00:42:31,300
So very rich material, very interesting topics.

404
00:42:31,660 --> 00:42:36,970
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

405
00:42:37,840 --> 00:42:41,380
urban notables in Arab nationalism sort of approach to politics and notables.

406
00:42:41,540 --> 00:42:44,470
So hope to have a manuscript done by the end of the summer.

407
00:42:44,890 --> 00:42:50,650
And as I returned in the autumn to full time teaching duties that we can put that one into production.

408
00:42:50,860 --> 00:42:55,450
Wonderful. Yeah, they really are strong. No, I'm not saying it is so much.

409
00:42:55,480 --> 00:42:56,320
It's such a pleasure, guys.