Fred Halliday (1946-2010)

Abstract

Fred Halliday exercised a quite extraordinary influence over all those who knew him – as friends, colleagues and students. The wider world, especially the part of it that used to be known as the ‘Third World’, really was his oyster. Beginning with two visits to Iran, one just before and one during his Oxford undergraduate years, followed by his travels inside Yemen and Omani Dhofar with a Lebanese fellow student, Fawwaz Trabulsi, in the late 1960s, he always seemed to have been somewhere first, to have summed up the situation there before I or those with similar interests had even begun to put a few first incoherent thoughts about it together. This was what he was later to call ‘doing the work’, that is going about, learning the languages (a remarkable number in his case), networking, collecting information and putting it all into some larger political and internationalist perspective. It often involved great physical risks, the more so as he soon became something of a marked man, the bane of the diehard British imperialists who fought tooth and nail to prevent the publication of his first book, Arabia Without Sultans (1975), as well as of many Third World dictators, not to speak of their radical successors like the Ayatullah Khomeini whose agents had him briefly detained in Teheran just after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.