Hisham Sharabi

While Hisham Sharabi was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1948, he had to face, almost overnight, a stunning realization: he might never again be able to go home. For home was Jaffa, a Palestinian city which had just been absorbed into the newly-established state of Israel. This event, as was the case for a multitude of other Palestinians in similar circumstances, was to change his life.

The student has now become a professor at Washington's Georgetown University, and has emerged over the years as one of the most active, persistent and articulate advocates of the rights of the Palestinians. He has never returned to Jaffa.

Having become a U.S. citizen in 1962, Professor Sharabi could now go back to visit his birthplace as an American tourist if he wanted to—but declines the opportunity. "Until there is a just settlement of the Arab-Israeli problem which gives the Palestinians their rights, I will not set foot in Jaffa again," he says.

Because of Professor Sharabi's background and his involvement in Middle East issues for so long, and, at times, so visibly (he was president of the National Association of Arab Americans in 1978), it can come as a surprise to some people to learn that the Arab world is not his academic specialty and never has been.

Philosophy and Culture

When he studied at the American University of Beirut, where he got his B.A. in 1947, he majored in philosophy. After getting to Chicago, he switched to cultural history, and picked up an M.A. and a Ph.D. in that subject. By the time he reached Georgetown in 1953 his area of specialization was set: European intellectual history.

"My Middle East activities are just an avocation," he says matter-of-factly. Some avocation! There seems little doubt that his involvement with the Middle East is broad and deep and consuming, and so is his commitment to try to make an impact on the way things eventually turn out there.

Middle East politics, Professor Sharabi acknowledges, has always been in his blood: when he was a student in Beirut in 1947, he joined a new Arab nationalist party dedicated to the eventual union of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Four years later, while in New York doing his Ph.D. dissertation, he worked at the United Nations, doing commentary in Arabic for its press section.

Since shortly after joining Georgetown, where he rose from the lowest rung of the academic ladder to full professor in only 11 years, he has been concentrating on teaching his academic specialty—but found it possible from the very beginning to conduct one course in Arab culture which could be expanded to include aspects of contemporary Arab politics as well. Out of one such course, for example, emerged a book called Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World. He has also written Government and Politics of the Middle East in the Twentieth Century, The Lethal Dilemma: Israel and Palestine, and Arab Intellectuals and the West, which he considers his best work. In addition, he is the author of a number of books in Arabic and has made prolific contributions to periodicals and newspapers on Middle East political subjects.

Peripatetic Participant

Professor Sharabi is an organizer of conferences on Middle East affairs as well as a peripatetic participant in them, and also travels out to the area on study missions. Thus, in 1980 he joined some other scholars on a tour of the major Gulf states, after which the group issued a report declaring that the threat of Israel was of more concern to those states than the threat of the Soviet Union. It made quite a splash at the time.

Yet he does more—much more. Professor Sharabi was intimately connected with the founding, in 1975, of Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, which over the years has built up what is probably the largest program of courses dealing with the contemporary Arab world of any university in the U.S. He is Georgetown's Umar al-Mukhtar Professor of Arab Culture—a chair which was originally endowed by Libya but is now provided for from the University's own funds. Outside the University, he is the founder and chairman of the Arab American Cultural Foundation, a non-profit group which sponsors and presents works and performances by Arab and Arab-American poets, musicians and artists.

In addition, Professor Sharabi has been the Editor, since its founding in 1971, of the Journal of Palestine Studies, a scholarly and prestigious quarterly published jointly by Beirut's Institute of Palestine Studies (IFS) and the University of Kuwait. Recently the IPS headquarters in Beirut was looted by the Israelis, who trucked away its archives and its library -regarded in academic circles as one of the best in the world on the subject of the Palestine question. What the Israelis did not take away they burned on the premises. Says Professor Sharabi: "The Israelis did not just loot a building—they came in and destroyed part of the cultural heritage of the Palestinian people."

Obviously there is still much more for Professor Sharabi to do before he can get back to Jaffa.