Let’s hear about your first choice, Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples, which you see as a real contribution to the history of the people in the Middle East and North Africa – why?

One of the key reasons is in the title. It is called the peoples not people, which I thought was very interesting. Hourani redefined how people look at the history of that part of the world. Typically, throughout the late 19th and early 20th century the history of the Arab peoples was told either in terms of religion, mainly by recounting the story of Islam since the time of the Prophet Mohammed and until the fall of the Ottomans, or from the perspective of state development. For example, how the Egyptian state emerged.

What Hourani did was something very different. He emphasised that all these points are secondary to the most important one, which is the culture that unites the different people who live in this large piece of land. And he paid specific attention to the language: he saw it as a key denominator between the people who live in the space from Morocco to Bahrain. He focused on the development of the language and the culture as a whole. He traced the history of those people through their contributions to the culture that came to emerge over the past 14 centuries. There is lots of Islamic history and politics in Hourani’s book. But the key illuminating point is on how the culture that has emerged has gathered those people and really united them by a common thread.

The second point, which I thought was very interesting, was how he focused on Arabism as an identity, rather than on the flow of the different Islamic empires. We sometimes forget that the Christian Arabs constituted at one point more than 20 per cent of the people in that part of the world. And their contribution was immense. It’s also crucial to remember that the idea of Arabism pre-dates Islam. And what Hourani has done is to take the idea of Arabism and to link it with his focus on culture and basically put that mix as the framework through which you can understand the history of the people who live there. The book covers more than 1,300 years of history, so to do that without losing the focus on your thesis I thought was a great contribution.

And what kind of role do you think the Christians have in that part of the world today?

This is a very interesting point because if you look at the last 200 years, especially in places such as Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, Arab Christians were at the forefront of social development in these countries. Arab Christians were key participants in the development of Arab liberalism at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. They played a big part in the development of education, journalism, and art, (whether cinema, theatre, literature, etc). But then the Arab liberal experiment was abruptly ended by the emergence of Arab nationalism. Gradually, the liberal values faded and were replaced by an antagonistic and sometimes pugnacious form of nationalism. And in the few decades that followed, political Islam started to gain significant ground across the Arab world. I discuss in my book in detail why these developments subtly but steadily eroded Christians’ involvement in their society.

Was there eventually less room for Christians in that new identity?

The interesting thing is that Arab nationalists, mainly Nasser, were very sensitive to the concerns of Egyptian and Levantine Christians but there was no escaping the fact that by promoting Arab nationalism you are throwing Egypt, for example, into the core of the Arabian hinterland, which for the past 14 centuries was ruled by Islam. And with the rise of Islamism throughout the 1970s and 1980s across the whole of the Arab world, Islam as an identity started to gain ground.