October 1996, pg. 10

Personality

Dr. Hisham Sharabi

by Andrew I. Killgore

Some years ago in Jerusalem I asked an Irish journalist working for the Palestine refugee organization to explain how it was that small Ireland had produced so many famous literary figures such as Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and, especially, the great poet William Butler Yeats, whom we both admired. After reflecting for several long moments, he replied, “Maybe it’s the repression.”

Could that also be the reason Palestine has produced so many brilliant people in every field? Was it not Britain’s Balfour Declaration in 1917 to create a Jewish state in Arab Palestine against the fierce opposition of its indigenous population, and the resulting forcible expulsion of a million Palestinians from their own country, that kindled such an inner driving force among Palestinians?

Whatever the explanation or explanations may be, even a casual look around will reveal many thousands of successful Palestinians in widely varied fields all over the globe. For example, there are Palestinians who started as young refugee businessmen with little or nothing, such as Haseeb Sabbagh, Sibih Masri, Jaweed al-Ghussein and Munir Atallah. Now all have joined the club of the super-rich.

There also are so many Palestinian professors in American universities that “the Palestinian professor” has become almost a cliché in American academia. Among the most distinguished of these professors/intellectuals are Birzeit (Palestine) University’s Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Columbia University’s Dr. Edward Said, Northwestern (lately Birzeit) University’s Dr. Ibrahim Abu Lughod and Dr. Hisham Sharabi, professor of European Intellectual History and Omar al-Mukhtar Professor of Arab Culture at Washington, DC’s Georgetown University.

Hisham Sharabi was a Palestinian refugee of a different sort. He was not driven out by Israeli violence and terror as were 750,000 other Palestinians in 1948-1949 and a further 250,000 in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Instead, he and several thousand Palestinians who were outside Palestine during the first (1948-1949) Arab-Israel war became refugees because they suddenly had no homes to which they could return. Their houses and lands had been taken over by Israel.

Born in Jaffa on Palestine’s Mediterranean coast, the son of a lawyer/judge, Sharabi studied at Beirut’s famous American University, where he received his BA degree in 1947. In 1948, he earned his master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Chicago.

His abrupt change to refugee status in 1948 had immediate, devastating consequences: No money; no home to return to; no discernible means to acquire the dreamed-of Ph.D. degree.

A Brilliant Academic

Happily, his Chicago professors saw a young man with such a brilliant academic record that he simply had to be helped. So the university made enough scholarships available to Sharabi to enable him to complete the academic work for the doctoral program. But his thesis remained to be written.

Somehow a part-time job materialized at the United Nations in New York, paying enough money for him to survive while working on the thesis at night and during off-hours. He completed his dissertation in 1953 and became Dr. Sharabi.

Then, as if he were under some lucky star, a cabled offer of employment arrived from Georgetown University. That great institution became his post-doctoral academic home and, 43 years later and still at Georgetown, Dr. Hisham Sharabi has become one of the best known and most admired professors/intellectuals in this country.

Because of his personal background and prominence in Palestinian activist affairs, people tend to assume that Sharabi’s academic specialty is the Arab world. It is, in fact, only his secondary field.

At the University of Chicago he took his master’s degree in philosophy. But an interdepartmental program on the history of culture dominated his Ph.D. studies. That provided the groundwork for his career at Georgetown as professor of European intellectual history. Secondarily, he is professor of Arab studies, and it was in this capacity that he had an early hand in the development of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, now recognized as one of America’s premier institutions in its field.

Professor Sharabi’s better known books in English are: A Handbook on the Contemporary Middle East; Governments and Politics of the Middle East in the 20th Century; Nationalism and Revolution in the Arab World; Palestinian Guerrillas; Palestine and Israel: the Lethal Dilemma; and Arab Intellectuals and the West, which he regards as his best work. His books in the Arabic language are: An Introduction to the Study of Arab Society; Strategy and Diplomacy of the Arab-Israel Conflict; and Memories of an Arab Intellectual.

In addition, he has written 10 chapters in published collections on a number of themes, 13 major articles and 25 major conference papers.

Meanwhile he has somehow found time to be editor (since 1971) of the scholarly Journal of Palestine Studies, chairman (since 1977) of the Jerusalem Fund, chairman of the Arab American Cultural Foundation, and chairman since 1990 of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine.

Those who know him only from his formidable array of titles and writings are surprised to find when they meet him personally that Hisham Sharabi is a very quiet man. Obviously he holds forth in his classrooms, but outside he listens far more than he talks—the personification of a thoughtful, introspective intellectual.

I once asked him what he thought of a particular man who had approached us with a proposal that, if accepted, might profoundly affect the future of my own magazine, the Washington Report. After several moments of silence, Sharabi’s answer was indirect but clear, “Well, we haven’t known him very long.”

It was a typically laconic comment by this prolific writer and greatly admired scholar, who achieved full professor status at Georgetown University in only 11 years. The other side of his studied calm is his determined, lifelong dedication to rectifying the monumental injustices and ending the generations of repression imposed on the Palestinian people—who today number 3.5 million in forced exile from their ancient homeland, and another 3.5 million living in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and inside Israel itself.

An American citizen for many years now, Hisham Sharabi could return as a visitor to his native Jaffa. But a purity of righteous anger holds him back until there is a just settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Nor does his continuing restless energy on behalf of justice for the Palestinians show any sign of abating. Currently he is initiating a series of preliminary meetings of diaspora Palestinians designed to assert their continuing rights in Palestine. This eventually will become institutionalized as the Conference of Return and Self-Determination (for Palestinians).