Hisham Sharabi

Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual Hisham Sharabi

Hisham Sharabi (1927-2005) was a distinguished Palestinian intellectual and an outspoken critic of traditional Arab society and culture. Despite his wealthy family and his upbringing as a member of the privileged class, his conscious self-analysis after the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel led him to radically change his former bourgeois outlook on his society and its culture.

Written in a simple language, Embers and Ashes tells of Sharabi's childhood and boyhood in Palestine, his youth and initial political activism as a university student in Lebanon, and his life and education as a graduate student in the US. He brings his newly acquired self-analysis and sociocultural criticism to bear on the story of each of these phases. As a boy happily growing up in Palestine, he observes how he was unconsciously indoctrinated in the values of his wealthy class, despite the beautiful memories he retains of his early life. In Lebanon, he observes the same imposed values and especially the authoritarian attitudes of his Arab professors at the university and of the leadership of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party he joined (although he describes in chilling detail the lamentable manner in which the Party's leader, Antun Sa'adah, with whom he was on intimate terms, was put to death by the authorities of Lebanon after a plot and a summary trial). In the United States he appreciates the freedom that his American professors allowed him in forming his own views and learning to defend them; he forms his first romantic relationships; and he observes the unbecoming behavior of some Arab students--even as he and they all hear about debacles in far-off Palestine and the Arab world.

Although Sharabi wrote many books in English and Arabic expressing his insights into the flaws of Arab societal structure, culture, and politics, it is his autobiography, Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual, published in Arabic in 1978, that offers a candid and poignant account of his own personal formation and development.