Professor Yusuf Ibish, Islamic scholar; Independent UK obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Pan-Islamist of Ottoman dignity
07 February 2003
Yusuf Hussein Ibish, Islamic scholar: born Damascus 29 March 1926;
Professor of Political Studies and Public Administration, American
University of Beirut 1960-84; Henry Luce Professor of Religion and Ethics,
Amherst College 1982-85; Professor of Islamic Studies, American University,
Washington, DC 1985-86 (Emeritus); Director, al-Furqan Islamic Heritage
Foundation 1999-2003; married 1946 Ramzieh Abdel-Kader (died 1997; one
daughter; marriage dissolved 1960), 1961 Joan Schenck (two sons; marriage
dissolved 1987); died London 19 January 2003.
Yusuf Ibish was in a sense one of the last of the Pan-Islamists, with a vast
storehouse of knowledge of things Islamic and an extensive network of
friends throughout the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia. The Director
of al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation in Wimbledon, south-west London, he
had many professional and academic connections with the UK. In 1976 he had
been one of the principal architects of the World of Islam Festival in
London.
Ibish was a distinguished scholar whose interests spanned both pre-modern
and modern Islamic culture and societies. His particular field of
specialisation was pre-modern Islamic political thought, but his interests
and expertise ranged far. His professional life was spent teaching, at the
American University in Beirut, Cambridge and Amherst. He leaves a legacy of
some 30 books: bibliographies and documentation of Arab politics, treatises
on Islamic political theory, analyses of Muslim society and biographies.
Among his most important later works in Arabic is an invaluable concordance
to the Koran, listing references to each verse from the 20 most significant
commentaries, spanning many centuries and schools of thought.
He was born in Damascus in 1926, son of Hussein Bey Ibish, a prominent
Syrian landowner of Kurdish descent, and grandson, on his mother's side, of
Abd al-Rahman Pasha al-Yusuf, one of the most powerful pro-Ottoman grandees
of Damascus at the end of the Ottoman empire. It is not entirely misplaced
to read the life of Yusuf himself as an Ottoman, après la lettre. He
retained an Ottoman dignity of bearing throughout his life, a dignity which
helped him to bear with fortitude a number of misfortunes in personal life.
Following elementary education in Damascus, Ibish studied at International
College in Beirut and later at the American University of Beirut. From
Beirut he went to Harvard, where he studied under Sir Hamilton Gibb,
arguably the most distinguished British Islamicist of the 20th century, but
also attended the seminars of such luminaries as the great classicist Werner
Jaeger. He completed his doctoral thesis in 1960 and returned to the
American University of Beirut, where he taught at the Department of
Political Science from 1960 to 1984.
Beirut was now to become his home and the place where he was at his happiest
and most productive. It was in Beirut that he published most of his works
and where he influenced several generations of students. Among his more
important contributions was an anthology of seminal texts in pre-modern
Islamic political thought as well as an edition of the memoirs of Emir Adil
Arslan, a Pan-Arabist political figure of considerable importance in the
first half of the 20th century.
Ibish, however, was at heart a peripatetic teacher, a professor/flâneur who
did his teaching outside the classroom as much as inside it. Opposite the
main gate of the American University there stood until recently the famous
Faisal Restaurant. It was here, in Beirut's equivalent to the Parisian Les
Deux Magots, that one could find almost any Arab intellectual, native
Beiruti or passing through, whom one hoped to encounter, and here where
Ibish held court.
At the centre of a circle of students, colleagues or friends, Ibish would
hold forth on almost any subject that took his fancy, from Damascene
traditional crafts to American foreign policy in the Middle East. There was
hardly any subject in Middle Eastern studies to which he would not
contribute a shaft of light, a footnote, an interesting new source, an
anecdote. He was immensely generous with what he knew and ready to help
anyone reach his very wide circle of acquaintances in the Arab world or
beyond.
He was often the first person that film makers or festival organisers would
contact when embarked on major Middle Eastern projects and it was largely
because of Ibish that the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976 was
such a memorable success. It is a matter much to be regretted that he did
not live to write his memoirs.
His exile from Beirut led him first to the United States but eventually back
to London. In 1991 he had been invited on to the board of a new cultural
organisation set up by the Yamani Cultural and Charitable Foundation and in
1999 he took over its directorship. In many ways, al-Furqan was Yusuf
Ibish's natural home: an Islamic cultural foundation housed in a beautifully
restored Jacobean house, a non-profit-making institute with global reach
working to preserve Islamic manuscripts, a research institute laying the
bibliographic and lexical groundwork for a longed-for resurgence of Arab
creativeness in science, an embassy, almost, hosting the local community to
events on diverse topics - al-Furqan was perfectly suited to benefit from
his wide knowledge, rigorous scholarship, aesthetic sense and professorial
guidance.
A great raconteur, he delighted both friends and students with his dead-pan
delivery and his stock of stories. Forgiving much, the one injustice he
could not forgive was that done to Palestine. To the end of his days,
Palestine was central in his mind and heart.
Tarif Khalidi