PROFESSOR Nicolas Ziadeh was one of the most prominent Arab historians of his time and inspired generations of students at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and elsewhere to strive for objectivity in times when history might be expected to serve the propaganda needs of governments or terrorist groups.
He had a long association with Britain and was a visiting lecturer or professor at such universities as London and Cambridge, as well as at Amman and Harvard. Ziadeh leaves more than 20 significant publications and hundreds of papers on modern and medieval history and was an active broadcaster, gregarious conversationalist and generous friend.
Nicolas Abdo Ziadeh was born in Damascus in 1907. His father, Abdo, was a Palestinian from Nazareth and worked as a clerk for the Hijaz Railway company. He died in 1914, though his death was only indirectly related to the outbreak of the First World War. As a Christian in the Ottoman Empire, he was not allowed to be in the army, yet was expected to contribute towards its costs. Imprisoned for a short while, he suffered neglect in prison and died in hospital in Damascus before being buried in an unknown mass grave. His wife, Helene Asad, had managed to hide away only a single sovereign and the young Ziadeh had to start work early to support her.
At the age of 16 he obtained an elementary teacher’s diploma and worked in Jerusalem under the British Mandate until 1935, when he won a scholarship to London to study history. In 1939 he returned to Palestine as a lecturer, staying until the conflict after the 1947 UN partition of the land forced him to return to Britain. He lectured at Cambridge and, in 1950, obtained a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
A year earlier Ziadeh had been appointed assistant director at Cyrenaica College, Libya, and, at the same time, a lecturer in modern Arab history at the AUB, where he rose to be head of department before he retired in 1974. But retirement did not curb Ziadeh’s activities. He went on to lecture at the AUB, at St Joseph College and at the University of Balamand, an Orthodox Christian institution, which he helped to found in 1988.
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His energy and memory into his nineties continued to amaze his friends. In between preparing series of radio talks for the BBC Arabic Service, for example, he would enthusiastically get into his car to drive to Aleppo for a single lecture or travel to India or Nigeria on tours.
While accepting official honours from such jealous rulers as the late president Hafez Assad of Syria, Ziadeh described himself as non-political. He believed that modern Arab nationalism, beginning with Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in the 1950s, had disappointed the hopes of his generation for a more democratic and tolerant society.
Ziadeh was also disappointed that many Muslim Arabs continued to doubt the patriotism of their Christian compatriots. The title of one of his books was Christianity and the Arabs. It showed what ancient roots Christianity had in Arab society and that a nation could have more than one religion without serious conflict arising. Others of his books had such titles as Medieval Travellers of the Arab World, Syria and Lebanon, and Damascus under the Mamluks .
His first wife, Marguerite Chahwane, died in 1974, leaving two sons. He married again, but the marriage lasted only a short while.
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Professor Nicolas Ziadeh, historian, was born on December 7, 1907. He died on July 26, 2006, aged 98.