Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, page 135

Bulletin Board

Compiled by Janet McMahon

CONVENINGS

The Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine will hold its seventh annual conference Sept. 11 on “The Palestinian Option: The Right to Resist,” featuring panels and an array of international speakers.The conference will take place at and inaugurate CPAP’s new quarters at 2435 Virginia Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037. Attendance is free, but registration is required by calling (202) 338-1290.

“Getting in the Way,” the Christian Peacemaker Congress IV, will take place Sept. 24-27 at Joyfield Farm in Manchester, IN, and will feature sessions on nonviolence and other forms of resistance, public witness, reconciliation and forgiveness, and worship. Among the keynote speakers will be Sara Reschly, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron. Registration fee is $85 and $35 for students and low income participants. For information on registration and accommodations contact The Christian Peacemaker Teams, P.O. Box 6508, Chicago, IL 60680, phone (312) 455-1199, fax (312) 666-2677, or e-mail cpt@igc.org.

The Sisterhood Is Global Institute and the U.N. Development Fund for Women, in collaboration with the Jordanian National Committee for Women, will sponsor an International Symposium on Eliminating Violence Against Women With a Focus on Muslim Societies, Sept. 26 and 27 in Amman. Speakers will include HRH Princess Basma Bint Talal of Jordan and women from throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Registration is free but reservations are required. For additional information or to register contact Rakhee Goyal at SIGI, 4343 Montgomery Ave., Suite 201, Bethesda, MD 20814, phone (301) 657-4355, fax (301) 657-4381, e-mail sigi@icg.apc.org, Web site www.sigi.org

DEATHS

Munir Bayoud, a retired mathematics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and co-founder of the American Arab Society, died July 12 in Dallas of cancer at the age of 87. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was born in Lebanon and received his B.A. and M.A. in math at the American University of Beirut. He then went to Palestine, where he taught at the Orthodox High School in Jaffa, and at St. George’s College in Jerusalem. In 1942 he was appointed Inspector of Labor by the British Mandate government, settled a major railway workers’ strike in Haifa, then was sent to London for an M.A. in labor legislation. Following the establishment of Israel in 1948, he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company in Tripoli, Lebanon and for the Contracting and Trading Company of Qatar.

He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1955, and joined the SMU faculty two years later, retiring in 1978. He was director of the Arab League’s Dallas regional office from 1975-82, and served as naional president of the United Holy Land Fund from 1983-85. Survivors include his wife, Katie, three children, two sisters, and many nieces, nephews and grandchildren. The United Holy Land Fund has established a Scholarship Trust Fund in Munir Bayoud’s name.

David Aalon, an Israeli scholar of Muslim history and co-author of the Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary of Modern Arabic, died June 25 in Jerusalem of cancer at the age of 84. A native of Haifa, he received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University, where he founded its department of Modern Middle East Studies in 1948, heading it until 1956. From 1963 to 1967 he was head of the university’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. He pioneered research on Egypt’s Mamluk period and, in 1972, was awarded the Israel Prize for his studies of the army and society in Muslim lands. Prior to his death he was named an honorary member of the American Historical Association, one of only 82 foreign scholars to have been so named since 1885.

Jafar Sharif-Emami, former Iranian prime minister and a close confidant of Shah Reza Pahlevi, died June 16 in New York at the age of 87. He first served as prime minister in 1960-61 and again in 1978, when he tried to placate the growing revolutionary movement through legalizing political parties and scheduling elections for mid-1979. His efforts a failure, he resigned after two months, in November 1978. After the shah fled Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini called for Sharif-Emami’s assassination, and the former prime minister escaped to New York, where he headed the Pahlevi Foundation.