Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was born on 15 February 1929 in the al-Manshiyya neighbourhood of Jaffa. He wanted to be a lawyer, and while still at school worked as a pageboy in the law office of Fayez Kanafani — father of the writer Ghassan Kanafani — learning his way around the courts. His own father had founded an iron and copper foundry in 1929 that secretly manufactured weapons for Palestinian rebels, and was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned by the British. In the 1947–48 school year Abu-Lughod helped establish the first nationwide union of Palestinian students, then volunteered for the Jaffa National Defence Committee. After the city fell in April 1948 his family fled toward Nablus; he boarded the last ship to leave Jaffa port on 3 May, bound for Beirut, and made his way through Damascus to Amman.

He reached the United States in 1949, took a BA at the University of Illinois in 1951 and a doctorate in Middle East studies at Princeton in 1957. He taught at Smith College and McGill before joining Northwestern University in 1967, where he spent thirty-four years as a professor of political science and chaired the department from 1985 to 1988. Much of his work went into building institutions that did not yet exist: the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, founded in 1968, and the journal Arab Studies Quarterly, founded in 1978, at a moment when Arab and Palestinian scholarship in North America had almost no independent platform of its own. He was elected to the Palestine National Council in 1977 and served until 1991.

Then he went back. At Birzeit University he held a professorship and the vice-presidency for academic affairs, drove the creation of the faculty of graduate studies, and helped found the Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights, the Palestinian human rights ombudsman, and the Qattan Centre for Educational Research and Development. In 1998 Birzeit named its Institute of International Studies after him. He died in Ramallah on 23 May 2001, during the second intifada, and was buried in the family plot in Jaffa — a return his own generation of exiles was almost never granted. Edward Said, his closest friend among Palestinian intellectuals, published an elegy for him under the title “My Guru.” His daughter, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, continued the family’s work on Palestine and the politics of representation.

Sources

• Ibrahim Abu-Lughod — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Edward Said, “My Guru: Elegy for Ibrahim Abu-Lughod” — London Review of Books
• Ibrahim Abu-Lughod — Wikipedia