23 Facts About Kamal Salibi

Kamal Suleiman Salibi was a Lebanese historian, professor of history at the American University of Beirut and the founding Director of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies in Amman, Jordan.

Kamal Salibi's dissertation was published under the title Maronite Historians of Mediaeval Lebanon.

Kamal Salibi then became professor in the Department of History and Archaeology where he joined other prominent and already established historians such as Nicholas Ziadeh and Zein Zein.

In 1982 Kamal Salibi finalised his book, The Bible Came from Arabia, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Kamal Salibi wrote subsequent works on biblical issues using the same etymological and geographic methodology.

In 1994, Kamal Salibi helped found the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies in Amman, Jordan, and became its director from 1997 until 2004, following his retirement from AUB.

Kamal Salibi was associated as a consultant with the Druze Heritage Foundation.

Kamal Salibi retired from the Department of History and Archeology at the American University of Beirut in 1998, and became professor emeritus.

Kamal Salibi moved to Amman in the early 1990s and became director of the Institute for Interfaith Studies there from 1994 to 2003.

Kamal Salibi believed Lebanon's Christian community had an important role to play in building a Lebanon distinct from its Islamic ambiance, but did not share the fanaticism about Lebanon's Christian nature shown by many of his Maronite colleagues.

Kamal Salibi dismantled the foundational myths which many of Lebanon's communities were attached to, and replaced them with a complex portrait of the nation as an intricate mosaic of disparate but interconnected communities, over which no one group exerted dominance.

Kamal Salibi was strongly opposed to sectarian politics, believing that it had been the ruin of his country, and was one of the first Lebanese to remove his religious denomination from the Lebanese census records.

Kamal Salibi pinned a copy of his new ID, which has 'I' for his math-hab outside his apartment in Ras Beirut.

Kamal Salibi was a lifetime bachelor, who devoted his life to books.

Kamal Salibi wrote three books advocating the controversial "Israel in Arabia" theory.

Kamal Salibi argued that 'Lebanon' itself in high antiquity was a place in the Southern Arabian peninsula.

Kamal Salibi's theory has been both attacked and supported for its supposed implications for modern political affairs, although Salibi himself made no such connection.

Tudor Parfitt wrote "It is dangerous because Kamal Salibi's ideas have all sorts of implications, not least in terms of the legitimacy of the State of Israel".

Kamal Salibi argued that early epigraphic evidence used to vindicate the Biblical stories has been misread.

Mesha, the Moabite ruler who celebrated a victory over the kingdom of Israel in a stone inscription, the Mesha stele found in 1868, was, according to Kamal Salibi, an Arabian, and Moab was a village 'south of Rabin' near Mecca.

Kamal Salibi shared the view of such scholars as Thomas L Thompson that there is a severe mismatch between the Biblical narrative and the archaeological findings in Palestine.

Thompson's explanation was to discount the Bible as literal history but Kamal Salibi's was to locate the centre of Jewish culture further south.

Kamal Salibi argued that the description in the Bible is of an extensive tract of land, substantially larger than Palestine which includes a very varied landscape, ranging from well-watered mountain-tops via fertile valleys and foothills to lowland deserts.