Informative but poorly organized and biased . Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples is a widely regarded general history of the Arab world. This is too bad, since as history the book is of low quality, with significant problems of organization and, where relevant to Hourani's apparent biases, factual accuracy. It does have its redeeming elements, but on the whole is for a variety of reasons not a reliable source as a general history of the Arab world, especially for the beginner.    Being the author of a general history of the Arab world myself, before I explain why I evaluate the book negatively I would like to suggest some alternatives, lest I be accused of attacking a rival publication out of self-interest. Philip K. Hitti's The History of the Arabs is a very detailed history which runs from pre-Islamic times to the 19th century. Arthur Goldschmidt's Concise History of the Middle East covers Turkey, Iran and Israel as well as the Arab world and is well-organized for beginners. It was the first general history of the Middle East I read as an undergraduate. Bernard Lewis' The Middle East focuses more on concepts and the flow of history but is also appropriate for those without a strong background in the region.    This book was first published in 1991. This review is based on the 1992 paperback version by Warner Books.    The initial weakness of this book begins with the very first chapter; although containing 458 pages of main text, Hourani's history devotes a mere seven pages to the pre-Islamic period. This is pretty amazing, for anyone familiar with that period, since Arab history prior to Islam is roughly as long as Arab history after it. Exactly how far back Arab peoples go in history is a matter of dispute, but certainly there were people one could call "Arabians" as far back as the beginning of the first mellinnium BC, or 1,600 years prior to Muhammad. The evidence is sporadic for sure, and no writer would give it equal prominence with later times, but seven pages is pretty paltry.    One might suspect an Islamic bias here, but the problem continues in the key early periods of Islam. The life of Muhammad and his immediate successors who established the basis for the Muslim world, spanning about a half century from Muhammad's first vision to the death of his son-in-law and successor Ali, get only 11 pages. The first Arab empire, the Umayyads (661-950), gets seven pages, and the Abbasid Empire (750-circa. 945), which is usually thought of as the "Golden Age of Islam," gets only six. This means 37 pages for the first 2,000 years of Arab history, including its framing epoch, and over 400 pages for the next 1,000. This would leave the uninitiated reader entirely without much sense of proportion.    What makes this book highly unrecommended for the beginner is its weak sense of organization. The middle time period between the collapse of Abbasid authority - roughly AD 950 - and the ascendance of the Ottoman Empire over the Arab world in 1517 is intrinsically a difficult time period to understand and a more difficult one on which to write a history. This is due to the fact that rather than there being one dominant power or a few powerful states, there is instead a multiplicity of dynasties with genuine authority in some areas not extending beyond the town level with a multifarious mixture of Sunni and Shia, Arab, Persian and Turkic ruling groups, not to mention the Latin states. Hourani makes no serious attempt to help the reader keep all of it straight by moving from a chronological approach prior to 950 to a topical one. There are ten chapters covering this time period and the social history of part of the previous two periods (the Umayyads and the Abbasids). There is one chapter which discusses the major power struggles of the time. If you want to understand the relative historical roles of the Buyids, the Fatimids, the Zengids, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks and their contemporaries, read something else.    It is within these ten chapters that this book contains its major strength - its "social history," or its description of the development of the Arab world. In fact I cited Hourani on the social history sections of my own book. In this regard, Hourani really is better than the alternatives. Over 200 pages of the book is devoted to detailing various aspects of how the Arab world came to be prior to the Ottomans. So for those who have already read a general history of the Middle East or the Arab world and want a more specialized knowledge, these chapters are quite useful.    I have several objections to how this book handles a variety of issues of current interest. This book was written during a time period when there was a great emphasis on negating certain negative images of Arabs and Muslims, to the point of deemphasizing any aspect of the Arab world which might be interpreted negatively. The word "jihad" doesn't even have an entry in the index, although it is used, or perhaps, misused. On page 247, Hourani describes a traditional view stipulating that the ruler has an obligation "to pursue jihad by maintaining the strength of the kingdom's defense..." This gives a misimpression, because legally jihad has two military meanings - the defense of Muslim lands and the Muslim community's collective obligation to spread Islam through conquest. Although jihad has a spiritual as well as martial application, its use is overwhelmingly in the military context, and while Muhammad's battles probably could be described as defensive, the vast majority of military actions between that time and the 19th century involved offensive operations (the Christian counter-offensives known as the Crusades being a major exception).    More broadly, the single most influential Islamist movement of the modern age, the Wahhabis, get only a few scattered mentions, and there is no real indication of the wave of extremism which by 1991 had been felt for some time. The primary non-Islamist ideological influence, Marxism, is discussed of course, but the influence of Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s is left out. Nazi Germany is mentioned once in passing, and in the same paragraph on page 331 Palestinian leader Amin Husseini is mentioned, but it isn't mentioned that he was a strong supporter of Nazis, that he moved to Germany during the Second World War and played an active role in the Holocaust, or that despite this he was made leader of the Palestinian cause by the nascent Arab League after the war.    Hourani's account of the 1967 is incredibly inaccurate, giving the impression that Egypt engaged in some bluster and then Israel started the war. He mentions Nasser's demand that the UN clear out of the Suez Canal zone, and includes the defense pact with Jordan, but omits a key fact - the mobilization of Egyptian forces in the Sinai. Once Egypt did this, Israel had no choice but to attack, because of its small population its economy could not handle an extended mobilization, while Egypt could. Hourani also doesn't mention the statements by Arab leaders to the effect that all Jews would be wiped out in the coming war.    On the whole, this is a useful book if one already has a framework understanding of Arab history and if one understands the slant that is being presented on issues of contemporary concern. Otherwise, I do not recommend buying it
Output: NEG