Remembering Mr. Hourani and Dr. Enayat.

During the 1980’s, as the Iraq-Iran war raged on, I lived in London for a couple of years. I was researching my dissertation and one of the important stopovers on my academic itinerary was Oxford University. One of Oxford’s colleges, St. Antony’s was known as the hub of Middle Eastern studies. In the 1980’s, that particular college had a roster of brilliant and learned professors. Among the kindest and most empathetic were Mr. Albert Hourani, who taught Arab and Islamic history, and Dr. Hamid Enayat, who was a Fellow of St. Antony’s and lectured on Modern Middle Eastern history. I stress kindness and empathy because it seems to me that those are the characteristics that graduate students are most in need of. As many of us who have passed through that stage may recall, graduate students live in a world of their own. After you read and read till you can read no more, you usually spend the rest of your time either haranguing your fellow students on theoretical consistency or trying to impress your professors. That last part is crucial; if you make a connection with a particularly accessible and attentive professor, you may ask him or her to read your first draft or suggest changes, listen to you on how you’re going to transform the world with your dissertation topic or just chat to him/her about your family problems. Your whole academic journey could be transformed if the right mentor were to appear to guide your hand through this isolating and sometimes quite difficult period. This is why Mr. Hourani and Dr. Enayat were so popular at St. Antony’s. They listened, for heaven’s sake, and they gave you of their heavily circumscribed time. They allowed you to blather on as if you were another Ibn Khaldun or Toynbee or even, Marx, and they imperceptibly and very patiently allowed you to formulate your thoughts in the vastness of their knowledge.

Sadly, both men are no longer with us but I remember their courtesy and charm until this day. The first time I met Mr. Hourani in his study, I conversed with him for about two hours on all kinds of subjects, large and small. I was invited to dinner shortly afterwards. As I recall, it was the first time that I had tasted beet soup. We watched Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on tv in utter silence. Even then, there were forebodings of American might. Some time later, he came to UCLA and gave a wide ranging and panoramic view of Middle Eastern studies that is still unsurpassed in its breadth and richness.

Dr. Enayat was just as considerate and attentive. I would like to think that my connection with him was more personal because I am of Iraqi origin and he was Iranian. I met him at the height of the Iraq-Iran war and he was very hospitable, quite unlike some of the Iranian graduate students at Oxford, who were wary and distant. I remembered him in Baghdad, where I had gone shortly afterwards to research my dissertation topic and I bought a photographic album depicting the Shi’a shrine cities in Iraq as a gift. After I returned from four months of study, I passed by St. Antony’s to see him. He was at dinner in St. Antony’s great dining hall, conversing, of course, with a graduate student. All I wanted to do was to give Dr. Enayat his gift and tell him first-hand about my impressions of Baathist Iraq after so many years outside the country but, wouldn’t you know it, the student kept droning on and on. Finally, he left and I was able to give Dr. Enayat the gift. I received a wonderful hand-written note thanking me several months before he passed away.

Both these men were humanists of the highest degree. They wrote books that are still in vogue, even thirty years later. In particular, I have used Dr. Enayat’s book, Modern Islamic political Thought (University of Texas Press, 1982) to great advantage, both in the classroom and in my own research. His book was the first, to my knowledge, that effectively and lucidly rewrote the tangled history of Sunni-Shi’a interaction (both in wartime and peacetime), in Iraq and Iran and elsewhere. He discussed in detail and with impeccable impartiality all the great controversies that divided, and still divide those two major Muslim camps. His conclusion is simple, elegant and reflective of the basic unities that tie both Sunnis and Shi’a together.

I think I’ll translate Dr. Enayat’s book in Arabic.