Fred Halliday;FRED HALLIDAY, who has died of cancer aged 64, was an academic whose main interest was the Middle East and its place in international politics.
His first major book, Arabia Without Sultans, was published in 1974. The culmination of adventurous field research in the region, it was a study of Arabian regimes, their support from the West and Iran, and the revolutionary forces fighting against them.
"The Arab Middle East is the one with the longest history of contact with the West; yet it is probably the one least understood," he wrote. "Part of the misunderstanding is due to the romantic mythology that has long appeared to shroud the deserts of the peninsula. Where old myths have broken down, new ones have absorbed them or taken their place."
A larger-than-life character, Halliday made an enormous impact in both academia and the media. He spoke with a sure and lucid voice, backed by extensive knowledge. He also knew many languages: Arabic, Persian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, French, German and Russian.
He had more than 20 books to his name and was professor of international relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) for more than 20 years.
Halliday was born in Dublin to Arthur Halliday and his wife, Rita (née Finigan). He was educated at the Marist school in Dundalk before attending Ampleforth College in Yorkshire. He graduated from Queen's College, Oxford, in 1967 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, and then went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
From 1969 to 1983, he was a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review. The journal represented the avant-garde of the intellectual left, with strong European and cosmopolitan orientations, adopting and developing new strands of European Marxism and engaging with a wide range of issues in developing nations.
Halliday established connections with, among others, Arab and Iranian intellectuals and activists, and travelled widely in the region. From these encounters and researches came his book Iran: Dictatorship and Developmentin 1978, which aroused great interest as it anticipated Iran's revolution the following year, though he did not foresee the Islamic bent of the revolution.
Further travel and research took him, with Maxine Molyneux, to Ethiopia and Yemen in 1977 and 1978, resulting in a jointly authored book, The Ethiopian Revolution(1981), tracing the conditions and causes of the 1974 revolution. He married Maxine in 1979.
His interest in Soviet policy and the cold war, and his critical stance on US intervention in Afghanistan, were recurrent themes in his writing, evident in Cold War, Third World: Essays On Soviet-American Relationsin the 1980s, published in 1989.
It was not until 1983 that Halliday formally entered academia with an appointment to a lectureship at LSE. He obtained his PhD from LSE in 1985, with a thesis on the Democratic Republic of Yemen. At LSE, he continued to write prolifically, now concentrating on international relations.
His interest in the Middle East acquired a more topical aspect with the rise of Islamic politics, Afghanistan and the attacks on September 11th, 2001, about which he wrote Two Hours that Shook the World(2001).
His interest in Muslim communities in Britain and Europe had begun with his earlier study of the Yemeni community in Sheffield, Arabs in Exile: Yemeni Migrants in Urban Britain(1992). His contribution to the debates on Muslims in the West came in some of the essays in his highly influential Islam and the Myth of Confrontation(1996), with his characteristically incisive arguments against the prevalent ideas of a "clash of civilisations" and the "otherness" of Muslims and their politics.
Halliday never shied away from controversy: he was forthright in his advocacy of justice, human rights and socialist democratic values, and against cultural relativism and apologetics for tyrannies in developing nations in the name of anti-imperialism.
This was part of his more general belief that imperialism and capitalism were often progressive forces in many parts of the world, notwithstanding their well-known oppressive and exploitative elements. In this vein, he considered the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan favourable, on balance, and indeed the period of communist control as a progressive episode in the violence and oppression that preceded and followed it.
Equally, he favoured western interventions in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq - Saddam Hussein and his regime being by far the greater evil - but criticised what he considered the arrogance and incompetence of the US and British administration of these policies.
He was elected to the British Academy in 2002. In 2008 he left LSE to take up a position as research professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. He loved that city and became part of a lively social and intellectual network there.
He was a great teacher and mentor, and numerous students and young colleagues acknowledge their debt to his supervision and inspiration. His lectures, both academic and public, were a great draw and never failed to stimulate and challenge.
Halliday's book Caamano in London: The Exile of a Latin American Revolutionary, about the former Dominican president's spell in London in the 1960s, will be published later this year.
His brothers, Jon and David, wife, Maxine, and son, Alex, survive him.
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Frederick Halliday: born February 22nd, 1946; died April 26th, 2010