George F. Hourani Lecture Series

George Hourani was born in 1913 in a suburb of Manchester, England to parents who had emigrated from Southern Lebanon. The Houranis were a Greek Orthodox family that converted to Presybterianism. His father was a successful merchant exporting cotton goods.

George was the 4th of six children. One brother, Albert, was a distinguished Oxford scholar of the modern Middle East who published an international best seller A History of the Arab Peoples. Albert trained more mideastern scholars than any one of his generation. The most prestigious book prize in Middle Eastern Studies is named after him. Another brother, Cecil, was an economic adviser to Tunesian President Bourguiba.

George Hourani won a fellowship to study classics at Oxford from 1932-1936. A trip to the Near East in 1934 led to his first publication, a criticism of French rule of Syria entitled “Syria Under the French Mandate” in the 1938 Contemporary Review. This work influenced his decision to continue his graduate studies in Princeton’s Department of Oriental Studies in 1937.

Hourani received his Ph.D. in 1939. The title of his dissertation was ‘Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean in the 9th and 10th centuries AD.’ A teaching position as lecturer at the Government Arab College in Jerusalem followed, and he began teaching Classics, logic, and history of philosophy. The Government Arab College, where Hourani taught, represented the highest education institution for Palestinian Arabs during the British mandate.

Around that time he met his wife Celeste ‘Lello’ Habib, who came from a well-known Egyptian Coptic family. In 1940 they were married in Egypt. In 1948, the British Mandate came to an end, and the Houranis, British citizens, moved to England. George spent 1948-49 writing the first draft of his book Ethical Value under the guidance of the philosopher J.P. Mabbott – a well respected philosopher of the time. The book, published years later by Allen and Ullwin and the University of Michigan, rejected non-naturalism and intuitionism in ethics and endorsed a variety of utilitarianism.

He was then offered a job as an assistant professor in newly founded Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in 1950. It was during Hourani’s years at Michigan that he began to concentrate on Islamic philosophy. He is responsible for definitive Arabic editions and translations of Ibn Rushid, better known as Averroes—an Islamic philosopher renowned for his commentaries on Aristotle. He also worked on the Mu’tazili scholar Ab dal Jabbar from an Islamic school of speculative theology that flourished in the cities of Basra and Baghdad during the 8th–10th centuries. 

From 1964-1970, Hourani served as the associate editor for the Journal of the American Oriental Society. In January 1967, he delivered a lecture at the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo and was soon afterwards asked to join the department. Soon after arriving at Buffalo, according to one student who eulogized him years later, “he took a constructive and moderating stand during the turmoil of 1969-1970.”

In 1971 OUP published his book Islamic Rationalism. In 1970, the Society for the Study of Islamic philosophy and Science was founded with Hourani as its vice president. The society published a series of books entitled “Studies in Islamic Philosophy and Science." In 1968, Hourani was elected president of the Middle East Studies Association and delivered the Presidential address “Palestine as a Question of Ethics" which had considerable impact on its listeners and readers.

Hourani was the chair of the UB Philosophy department from 1976-1979. He developed a popular seminar in Greek ethics and taught medieval philosophy. In 1980 he was promoted to the rank of distinguished Professor of Islamic Theology and Philosophy. A festschrift in his honor, Islamic Theology and Philosophy, was published in 1984 by SUNY Press.

Recurring heart problems led to Hourani's death in 1984. At his memorial service, a former student spoke of  “his rationality, fairness and the courage to speak out on sensitive issues. He took students under his wing, inviting them to his home and giving them reassurance during times of distress.” He was memorialized as “uncompromising in his quest for truth, insisting on the highest standard of scholarship, of clarity and thought and the shunning of the sophistical and pretentious."