Farhat J. Ziadeh 1917–2016

Abstract

Farhat Jacob Ziadeh, founder and first chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, and a distinguished scholar in the field of Islamic law, writer, teacher, and administrator, died on 8 June 2016 at the age of ninety-nine. Ziadeh was born on 8 April 1917 in Ramallah, Palestine where he received his early education. After graduating from the American University of Beirut in 1937, he studied law at the University of London, receiving an LL.B. degree in 1940. For the next eight years he worked as a lawyer and Arabic instructor in the United States, England, and Palestine. In 1948, he joined the Princeton University faculty as a lecturer in Arabic. The following year he married Suad Salem, who, like himself, was also from Ramallah. They raised five daughters: Shireen, Susan, Rhonda, Deena, and Reema. In 1950, Ziadeh began working with the Voice of America in New York as the editor of the Arabic desk. Since this was a full-time job, he could continue as a lecturer at Princeton only on a part-time basis. In 1954, however, Princeton offered him an assistant professorship, which he accepted. At Princeton, Ziadeh collaborated with the late R. Bayly Winder to write An Introduction to Modern Arabic (1957). It was during this period also that Ziadeh began to work on his translation of Ṣubḥī Maḥmaṣānī’s Falsafat al-Tashrīʿ fī al-Islām under the title, Mahmassani's Philosophy of Jurisprudence in Islam (1961).