Birth: NULL/NULL/1937 Death:NULL/NULL/2005
Born in Haifa in 1937; dispossessed with his family during the Nakba of 1948 and fled to Beirut; later moved to the US for his university studies; graduated with a BA in Mathematics and Physics from Hamilton College in New York; receiving an MA (1961) and a PhD (1971) in Sociology from the University of Connecticut; founding member and Pres. of the Association of Arab American University Graduates; founding member of the Arab Sociological Association; co-founder and chairman of the Palestine Congress of North America (formed in 1979 and disbanded in 1983); editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly from 1987-90; member of the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Holy Land Studies; founding fellow of the Middle East Studies Association; Board member of Partners for Peace (formerly the American Alliance for Palestinian Human Rights in Washington); Board member of the Middle East Children’s Alliance in Berkeley; one of the first members of the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and of the Executive Committee of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, both in Washington; founding member of the Trans-Arab Research Institute in Boston; critical of the DoP and Oslo process; founding dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the newly established American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates from 1997 to 1999; Professor of Sociology at the American University in Washington, DC, where he also founded the Arab Studies Program and served as Chairman of the Department of Sociology for 11 years (until his retirement in 2003); in 2004, was named founding dean of Academic Affairs and the College of Arts and Sciences at the newly established American University of Kuwait, where he served until Feb. 2005; author and editor of several books, incl. Palestine and the Palestinians (Westview Press, 1997) and Culture and Customs of the Palestinians (Greenwood Press, 2004); died of a heart attack on 9 June 2005.
