Hisham Sharabi. Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual.

• Author: Hagopian, Elaine
• Position: Book review

Hisham Sharabi. Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual. Translated by Issa J. Boullata. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2008.186 pages. Paper $15.00.

THE 1967 WAR TRIGGERED a frantic Arab-American rush to organize and to challenge the mendacious Zionist narrative. The community intellectuals formed the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) and pursued a program of scholarly analyses which challenged Zionist accounts. I served on the AAUG Board with Sharabi among others. He was quiet-spoken and verbally economic in his interaction with others but clearly politically committed and intellectually accomplished. He was a complex personality, confounding friends and enemies alike with his sphinx-like manner. His memoirs go far in revealing and clarifying his persona.

Originally written in Arabic and published in Beirut in 1978, Issa Boulatta's translation has made this important memoir by one of the most outstanding Palestinian-origin intellectuals accessible to English-language scholars. Sharabi (1927-2005) was in his late forties when he penned these reflections, providing the reader with insight into his intellectual evolution and rooting it in the turbulent history of Palestine and bordering countries.

Sharabi was born in Jaffa, did his undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and then went on to the University of Chicago for his graduate work, leaving Palestine in December 1947. In hindsight, he expressed honest bafflement as to how he could have left Palestine while internal war was going on and the Zionist takeover of Palestine proceeding. His non-responsiveness to these events seemed strange to him in retrospect because he was politically committed as a member of the secular Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) as were so many Arab intellectuals and literati. The Party focused on re-uniting the countries of Greater Syria and rectifying the tragedy of Palestine as a core issue. He spent his life searching for the political, social and structural changes required to reverse the injustice done to Palestine and to the Arabs. His life story is intertwined with that search.

Sharabi expounds on two important topics: 1) the authoritarian/repressive nature of Arab society and its impact on the individual; and 2) the goals of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and its founder/leader, Antun Sa'adeh. Regarding the first, he bluntly exposes the patriarchal character of Arab society and...