Kamal Salibi has died. He is the well-known Lebanese historian who did his PhD in the early 1960s at the University of London under Bernard Lewis. Kamal Salibi underwent an amazing political transformation. He started as a fanatic Lebanese nationalist who served as the Faculty Adviser for the Lebanese League at AUB, which is the Phalanges association on campus (until the civil war when no Phalanges organization was tolerated in West Beirut). By the advent of the civil war, Salibi's politics changed. He was the closest friend of Usamah Al-Khalidi (a passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause, and an activist as well). And Salibi also (almost) adopted the Palestinian student (turned historian at AUB), `Abdur-Rahim Abu Husayn. Salibi bravely broke with his own past and and denounced his own finding of his book, the Modern History of Lebanon, which he wrote under the guidance and at the suggestion of Bernard Lewis. His break with his historiographical past in his later book, a House of Many Mansions. Salibi became very critical of the Phalanges and the Lebanese Forces and squarely blamed them for the war. But his views on sects were rather sectarian and he preserved some views of Lebanon and the Arab world that bordered on the racist (see his last bizarre interview with As-Safir which I linked to at the time few months ago. But he became very anti-Zionist). I took one course with him at AUB, A History of Arabia. I learned a lot from him and I also learned about the beauty of the massive lexicographical work, Lisan Al-`Arab by Ibn Mandhur. He told the class that the 20 volumes of that work could be read for fun. And when I obtained that book, I realized how right he was. I was not close to him but got to meet him several times during his visits to the US. In one such visit to Georgetown, he was so angry with the Saudi government. It was sometimes in the 1980s, and he had started his work on "the Bible came from Arabia" (I really really wish that he never started this work of his because I don't think that he made any breakthrough and relied purely on lexicographical evidence). He told me how he relied on one Saudi historian. He explained to me that the Saudi government was so outraged by his work (apparently, they were afraid that the Zionist movement would make claims on Arabian territory, and that Saudi fear really disgusted him--he was outraged). He said that the Saudi government pressured this old man in his 1980s (the Saudi historian), and made him tell the mouthpiece of Prince Salman, Ash-Sahrq Al-Awsat, to denounce his own work and to say that he had made mistakes in his own work, which he did not, as Salibi told me the story. But his political views were transformed and comrade Ahmad Dallal got to know him well here in the US when they both were at Smith College for a while and would tell me about those changes. Salibi is an interesting writer: he would write his text and then go over it one last time and remove any word or sentence whose absence would not detract from the meaning. How I badly need that exercise. He left West Beirut in the 1980s and got to be close to the lousy former Crown Prince Hasan of Jordan and wrote not a good book on Jordan. Salibi wrote a very interesting Arabic book on his life experience and continued to read and write. I loved that he had an Orientalist training, in the good sense of the word: he was very well-versed in several language. He once shared with me an academic paper he wrote on the history of the word Hadramawt (or Hadramut, i forgot his conclusion of the dispute over the pronouncement of the word). Let me make this prediction: An-Nahar and other lousy right-wing publications in Lebanon will now claim him as a Lebanese nationalist, when he died so far from that lousy ideology.
