15 Facts About Tarif Khalidi

Tarif Khalidi is a Palestinian historian who now holds the Shaykh Zayid Chair in Islamic and Arabic Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.

Tarif Khalidi's sister is Randa al-Fattal, a Palestinian-Syrian author, playwright and political activist.

Tarif Khalidi's son, Muhammad Ali Tarif Khalidi, is a philosophy professor at York University.

Tarif Khalidi's daughter, Aliya Khalidi, is a lecturer at the Lebanese American University.

The Tarif Khalidi family has lived in Jerusalem since the eleventh century and is noted for a long line of judges and scholars.

Tarif Khalidi's father was principal of the Government Arab College in Jerusalem from 1925 until 1948.

Tarif Khalidi served as Deputy Director of Education under the British Mandate.

Tarif Khalidi was the author of several works on educational theory and on Palestinian history.

Tarif Khalidi was a pioneer feminist, activist and writer; and the first Muslim woman in Greater Syria to publicly remove her veil in 1927.

Tarif Khalidi translated several literary works into Arabic, including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and published her memoirs in 1978.

In 1952, Tarif Khalidi attended Haileybury College in Hertford, England where he was on the classical side.

Tarif Khalidi received a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago in 1970.

Tarif Khalidi taught at AUB through the Lebanese Civil War with a brief departure from 1985 to 1986 to become a senior research associate at St Antony's College, Oxford.

Tarif Khalidi returned to AUB again in 2002 to occupy his position as Shaykh Zayid Chair at the Center for Arab and Middle East Studies.

Tarif Khalidi wrote an influential paper on Palestinian Historiography from 1900 to 1948 in which he argued that much of the historical writing came to centre on the history of the Arabs and of Palestine, in an attempt to re-define the place that Palestine occupied in the Arab world in general and to emphasise its ties to Egypt and Syria in particular.