The War on Terror

"My homeland, you have spurned me … I shall never return to you … I shall never ever return to you …"

So ends Hisham Sharabi’s compelling autobiography, Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual. Sharabi, a leading Palestinian intellectual who died in 2005, uttered these words to himself on board a plane from Amman, Jordan to the United States in 1949. He studied and taught in the US for the rest of his life, retiring as a professor of history at Georgetown University in 1998. Ably translated from Arabic by Issa J. Boullata, Embers and Ashes is a poignant story of an intellectual’s exile and struggle.

Sharabi transports the reader seamlessly from his early life in Palestine, where he was born in 1927, to his studies at the American University of Beirut, and finally his own American experience and life as a university professor at Georgetown. While it occasionally lacks cohesion, the book is unmistakably personal and insightful.

Sharabi’s departure from Amman was preceded by tumultuous36in Lebanon where he was a prominent activist in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), led by Antun Saadeh. Perhaps more than anyone else, it was Saadeh who influenced Sharabi’s intellectual trajectory. Saadeh’s political line and that of the SSNP was premised on unity between Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Sharabi depicts Saadeh sympathetically as a man of deep human values: courageous, inspirational and subtly intellectual. But he also shows other aspects of Saadeh’s personality:

"He used to speak of the party as if it were an actual government on the verge of taking power. In his personal behavior and public stance, he acted like a man of state. The party in his view was the only political force that stood up to colonialism and could achieve independence. It was the only force that could liberate Palestine. I think that Saadeh underestimated the depth of sectarian, tribal, and feudal feelings in [Lebanon]" (150-151).

There are two issues regarding Saadeh’s approach to which Sharabi submitted uncritically, and on which he later seems to renege. Firstly, he did not oppose Saadah’s grandiose vision of the Syrian homeland, which shifted from being confined to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan, to include Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus. Secondly, Sharabi embraced Saadah’s view that "the individual was a mere means that society used to achieve its aims; and that society represented a firm and abiding ‘truth,’ whereas individuals fell away like autumn leaves," thereby "ascribing a universality to society and considering society an ultimate ideal in itself" (59-60). However, Sharabi developed a more nuanced and critical view of these matters, particularly in his attribution of a more central and visible role to the individual in society.

Sharabi was also influenced by German philosopher Nicolai Hartmaan, who "considered moral values as justice, courage, love, and friendship to be objective and timeless. For him, those values enjoyed an eternal existence, like Plato’s ideals" (129).