Suheil Bushrui

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Suheil Badi Bushrui (September 14, 1929 – September 2, 2015) was a Palestinian-born professor, author, poet, critic, translator, and peace advocate. He became a leading scholar on Kahlil Gibran and also wrote about Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and John Millington Synge. He helped bring Yeats’s poetry to Arab readers by translating it into Arabic.

Bushrui studied at St. George’s School in Jerusalem and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southampton in 1965 with a thesis on Yeats’s verse-plays, The Revisions 1900–1910. In 1968 he became the first Arab to hold the Chair of English at the American University of Beirut, a position he kept until 1986. He taught in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, and published many books and articles in English and Arabic on literature, religion, and world affairs. He was the first non-Western chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature.

In 1992 he became the first Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, where he worked on peaceful, spiritual approaches to global problems. He later directed the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace at Maryland and served as a Senior Scholar of Peace Studies at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. His 2007 book The Essential Gibran presents Khalil Gibran’s life-affirming philosophy, which Bushrui described as lifeist. Throughout his career, he inspired many students to pursue peaceful, culturally aware ways to resolve conflicts. He passed away in Dayton, Ohio, in 2015 at the age of 85.