Albert Hourani

Albert Fadlo Hourani (Arabic: ألبرت فضلو حوراني‎ Albart Faḍlū Ḥūrānī; March 31, 1915 – January 17, 1993) was a British historian, specializing in the Middle East. He was of Lebanese descent.

Background and education

Hourani was born in Manchester, England, the son of Soumaya Rassi and Fadlo Hourani, immigrants from Marjeyoun in what is now South Lebanon (see Lebanese diaspora). Fadlo had studied at what later became the American University of Beirut and settled in Manchester as a cotton merchant Albert's brothers were George Hourani, philosopher, historian, and classicist, and Cecil Hourani, economic adviser to President of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba. His family had converted from Eastern Orthodoxy to Scottish Presbyterianism and his father became an elder of the local church in Manchester. Hourani himself, in turn, converted to Catholicism in adulthood.

Fadlo Hourani tried to enroll Albert into a preparatory school in Manchester but it did not accept him as it did not take 'foreigners'; Fadlo instead opened an alternative school in which Albert studied in until the age of fourteen. He later studied at Mill Hill School, London before attending Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, Economics and History (with an emphasis on international relations in the politics section of the degree), graduating first in his class in 1936.