Hume Alexander Horan

Hume Alexander Horan (August 13, 1934 – July 22, 2004) was an American diplomat and ambassador to five countries, who has been described as "perhaps the most accomplished Arabic linguist to serve in the U.S. Foreign Service."

Horan was born to Margaret Robinson Hume and Abdullah Entezam in 1934 in Washington, D.C.. His mother came from a well-to-do family; her grandfather served as a diplomat in President Abraham Lincoln's administration, her own father had been the mayor of Georgetown, and Stephen Vincent Benét was a cousin. Entezam was an Iranian diplomat. Horan's parents divorced just three years after his birth (though they had been married for over a decade), and Margaret Hume subsequently married a newspaperman named Harold Horan. The family then moved to Argentina. Entezam went on to become the Iranian Foreign Minister and head of National Iranian Oil Company before dying in 1985.

Horan was sent by his parents to a boarding school in Rhode Island named Portsmouth Priory, and as an adolescent at an all-boys school he detested it. Horan was soon thrown out and sent to study at the St. Andrew's School in Delaware, which he found much more enjoyable.

In 1954 Hume Horan joined the U.S. Army, leaving two years later to study at Harvard College. In 1960 he graduated from Harvard with a degree in American History and promptly joined the U.S. Foreign Service, though he came back to Harvard to earn his M.A. in 1963 at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, during which time he studied Arabic under the British orientalist Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb.

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