Abdel Wahab Elmessiri

Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri (Arabic: عبد الوهاب المسيري‎, 1938-July 2, 2008) was an Egyptian scholar, author and general coordinator of the opposition organization Kefaya.^[1]

Elmessiri was born in Damanhur, Egypt, graduated with a BA in English literature from Alexandria University in 1959. He received a MA in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in 1964 and a PhD in the same field from Rutgers University in 1969. He was professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Ain Shams University, Egypt since 1988. He was also a University Professor at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia (1983-1988) and at Kuwait University, Kuwait (1988-1989) and a visiting Professor at the International Islamic University Malaysia. He is considered as one of Egypt's most famous thinkers and very well-known among Arab scholars.

Elmessiri's major areas of research included: Jews, Judaism and Zionism; secularism and prejudice; Western culture and contemporaneity; modernism and postmodernism; literary theory and comparative literature. Over the course of his life his outlook moved from western secularism to a modern islamic vision. Elmessiri wrote several articles about his ideas, including "Chosen Community, an Exceptional Burden", "A People Like Any other". He has also written for children.^[2]

His eight-volume Encyclopaedia of "Jews, Judaism and Zionism" (" موسوعة اليهود واليهودية والصهيونية: نموذج تفسيري جديد"), written in Arabic with an analytical/methodological form rather than an encyclopedic collection of information, is considered as one of the most authentic works in the field. This work, published in 1999 by Dar El Shorouk, Cairo, was the culmination of around 30 years of research.

On July 2, 2008 he died after a very long battle against cancer at the Palestine Hospital, Cairo.

[edit] Statements by Abdel Wahab Elmessiri

• According to MEMRI, in 2004, Al-Massiri said in an interview on privately owned Egyptian Dream2 TV that the USA and Israel are hedonistic societies, devoid of values, and are less willing to fight and suffer casualties in order to defend their homeland or their honor.^[3]

[edit] English language publications

• "Israel, Base of Western Imperialism" (Committee of Supporting Middle East Liberation, New York, 1969)
• A Lover from Palestine and Other Poems (Palestine Information Office, Washington D.C., 1972)
• Israel and South Africa: The Progression of a Relationship (North American, New Brunswick, N.J., 1976; second edition 1977; third edition, 1980; Arabic translation, 1980)
• The Land of Promise: A Critique of Political Zionism (North American, New Brunswick, N.J., 1977)
• Three Studies in English Literature (North American, New Brunswick, N.J., 1979)
• The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry [editor] (Three Continents Press, Washington D.C., 1983)
• A Land of Stone and Thyme: Palestinian Short Stories [co-editor] (Quartet, London, 1996)
• "Epistemological Bias in the Social and Physical Sciences" (International Institute of Islamic Thought, London - Washington, 2006)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• (Arabic) Official homepage
• "A people like any other" Al-Ahram Weekly
• Dr. Abdul-Wahab El-Messiri: leading intellectual light of Islam and politics in Egypt Obituary in the Yemen Times, 15 July 2008
• "On life, literature and Palestine, a tribute to Abdelwahab Elmessiri" Obituary on The Electronic Intifada, 4 August 2008