Biography

Where I come from, and my academic background

I was born in Croydon in 1951, and grew up in Coulsdon at the southern tip of the Greater London conurbation. I was educated nearby at the John Fisher School, Purley. It gave my parents immense pride when my brother and I went to university - the first generation in our family in which this had been possible. They were equally proud of our subsequent careers.

In 1970, I went to Wadham College, Oxford, to read Arabic and graduated from Oxford University in 1973. I spent the next two academic years as a graduate fellow at the American University in Cairo (AUC) studying for an MA in Islamic History. I was in Cairo during the 1973 war which Egypt and Syria fought against Israel, and visited Syria from Cairo in November 1974. That trip included a walk through the mountains from the famous Crusader castle at Krac des Chevaliers to the Assassin castle at Masyaf, during which I spent every night as the guest of local people. I often wonder what has happened to their families during these difficult times for their country.

My post-graduate work was on early Sufi thought. For my MA thesis I produced the first translation of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's The Book of The Affirmation of the Divine Unity and Trust in God into English (Book XXXV of his monumental The Revival of the Religious Sciences), written in the late twelfth century. In 1975 I returned to Oxford believing I was beginning a lifetime's project unravelling the mental universe of the medieval Sufis. Yet it was not to be. After a little over a year, my interest in my subject faded like a mountain mist. I therefore wrapped up my research by producing an M.Litt thesis on the concepts of poverty and renunciation of the world in the Sufi manual literature of the 10th-12th centuries AD, and decided to gain a professional qualification as a solicitor.

My career as an international lawyer

My first big career break was in 1981-6, which I largely spent in Oman helping to set up an office for my London law firm. My duties included translating Omani legislation into English and handling litigation before the local commercial courts. I also explored the mountains of the Jabal Akhdar at weekends. This was followed by my second career break which lasted until 1995 and made me a full partner in my firm. I worked as part of the government of Bahrain's legal team attempting to resolve disputes with Qatar over questions of territorial sovereignty and maritime boundaries. My duties included coordinating historical research aimed at uncovering evidence, and handling the interface between Arabic and English documentation. In 1994, I was listed as one of the counsel for Bahrain at the International Court of Justice in the Hague during the jurisdiction and admissibility phase of the case. Also that year Dr Abdulla Maktari, a Yemeni lawyer friend, and I produced the first book of translations of Yemeni commercial laws into English. I subsequently worked on another international boundary dispute in the Middle East, details of which I cannot disclose because of client confidentiality.

During the final period of my legal career I returned to Cairo, where my firm had now established an office. Between 2001 and 2006 I visited Egypt regularly, often for months at a time. I was there for both 9/11 and 7/7. During this period, I also followed up my interests in international law, especially in territorial sovereignty, by accepting an honorary visiting fellowship at the Scottish Centre for International Law at Edinburgh University. I produced a legal analysis of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was published in the International and Comparative Quarterly in 2002. It was cited before the International Court of Justice during the proceedings which led to its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. My article seems to have stood the test of time since, so far as I know, nobody has made a serious attempt to refute it.

I become a historian

Most of my career has been concerned with the Middle East, and I have always been perplexed by the lack of understanding of Islam and the Arab world that seems to be endemic in the West. In the early 2000s, matters seemed to be getting worse. First there was 9/11. Then, in 2003, came the US-led invasion of Iraq in which Britain also participated. All this was roughly at the same time as the Second Intifada and the failure of the peace process in Israel and Palestine. The invasion shocked me profoundly, since I did not see how the political leaderships of the USA and Britain could possibly be so naive, myopic and ill-informed as not to perceive the probable consequences of their course of action, despite the expertise and advice that was supposedly at their disposal. That was when I resolved to do what I could to make the Arab world and Islam more accessible for people in the West. I left my law firm and began a new career as a historian. I soon started work on what would become my first book: A Concise History of the Arabs.

In June 2008, my life changed permanently and immensely for the better when I married Middle East cultural historian Diana Darke. We had known each other slightly ever since I was a research student, but for both of us the world had revolved many times on its axis since the 1970s. Diana had recently bought a courtyard house in the Old City of Damascus which she was painstakingly restoring. In the years leading up to Syria's descent into darkness over the course of 2011-2, we were frequent visitors there. We also returned to Damascus a number of times in the early stages of the civil war and witnessed the situation as it began to deteriorate, and then in late 2014 we returned for her to retake possession of the house. Finally in 2018 we visited Syria in a party who were guests of the Syrian Orthodox Church.

My first book, A Concise History of the Arabs finally came out in 2013. It has been translated into Spanish and Turkish. A revised second edition appeared in 2016 and a third in October 2023, at the same time as the beginning of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It sets the scene to show how the Middle East had come to be where it was on the eve of that terrible day, and subsequent events will probably come as little surprise to anyone who reads it. My second book, Syria: A Recent History, first appeared in 2014. An updated edition appeared in December 2017. This was shortly after my third book, A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is, was published. It has been translated into Greek and Polish while Arabic and Bengali translations are pending. I have also published a number of articles. Those of which I am proudest are my piece on James Sanua, the early Egyptian nationalist who was a Jew (published in Jewish Quarterly in 2014) and my 2015 Gingko Library article examining whether the mandate system in the Middle East was a slow burning fuse leading to the toxic sectarianism of today. It was subsequently produced in a book containing the proceedings of the Gingko Library conference at which I first delivered it. After the publication of Syria: A Recent History, I was invited to become a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St Andrews. This is an honour that I greatly appreciate.

My approach in my books is to try to give the reader an intellectually honest and historically accurate narrative that is consistent with the best academic work, but is still accessible by the general reader. The world faces a dark future if we do not try to understand each other more, and I hope that in my own, small way, I am contributing to mutual comprehension. My next book, Another Road to Hell, will be a deep dive into the histories of Zionism and Islamism and how they both led to the carnage that began on 7 October 2023.