ABSTRACT
In a career spanning half a century, Majid Khadduri has made manifest contributions to the study of the Middle East. Majid Khadduri is himself a balance of Eastern and Western outlooks, having found in the West the tools to make sense of his own civilization. Like so many of his generation and class, he gravitated to the American University of Beirut and, no doubt, found confirmation there of the view that Arabs would be at the threshold of development if only they acquired the modern skills which the West could offer. Khadduri was committed to the scholarly life, and it was the opportunities which American universities afforded in this regard that, once and for all, attracted him away from government and from Iraq. Majid Khadduri’s work stands or falls on the basis of its empirical exactitude and analytical rigor. Ironically, Khaddur’s eagerness to see balance and harmony prevail sometimes leads him to minimize the force of his own conclusions.
