Birth: NULL/NULL/1935 Death:NULL/NULL/2003
Born in Talbiyah, Jerusalem, on 1 Nov. 1935 to a Christian family; spent his early childhood in (West) Jerusalem, where he attended the Anglican St. Georges Academy; then the family moved to Cairo in 1947 in the wake of the UN Partition Plan; was educated in the American School in Cairo and the British-run Victoria College in Alexandria; emigrated to the US, where he studied from 1951 at the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts; graduated from Princeton University with a BA and later from Harvard University with an MA and a PhD in English Literature in 1964; became an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the English Dept. of Columbia University in 1963 and full professor in 1970; was an unaffiliated member of the PNC from 1977-91; became a key member of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East in the early 1980s; served as Consultant to the UN for the International Conference on the Question of Palestine in 1983; was one of two PNC members (with Prof. Ibrahim Abu Lughod), who met US Sec. of State Shultz in March 1988 to discuss his peace proposals; helped to draft the Palestinian constitution in 1988; voted for adopting the two-state solution at the 1988 PNC in Algiers; was a long and ardent supporter of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, but quit the PNC over the PLO’s support of Saddam Hussein in the 1990/91 Gulf crisis; became a bitter critic of Arafat after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which he rejected as PLO capitulation and “a Palestinian Versailles;” harshly criticized the negotiations and the PA performance ever since; was a member of the Modern Language Association, serving as its Pres. in 1999; was a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; member of the American Philosophical Society, of the Royal Society of Literature, of King’s College, Cambridge, the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Honorary Fellow of the Middle East Studies Association; served as Visiting Professor at Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities and has lectured at over 100 others, mainly in the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East; helped establish – along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakkak, and Mustafa Barghouti – the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, in 2002 in an attempt to build a democratic, reformist third force in Palestinian politics;received numerous awards and literary prizes, incl. Columbia’s Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, as well as honorary doctorates from the universities of Birzeit, Chicago, Michigan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jami’a Malleyeh, Toronto, Guelph, Edinburgh, Haverford, Warwick, Exeter, National University of Ireland and AUC; has authored numerous philosophical, literary and political articles and books, translated into dozens of languages, incl. Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983); After the Last Sky (1986), Blaming the Victims (1988); Culture and Imperialism (1993); The Politics of Dispossession (1994); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995); Out of Place: A Memoir (1999):End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000); Reflections on Exile (2000); and Power, Politics, and Culture (2001); died of leukemia on 25 Sept. 2003 in New York.
