Rashid Khalidi (born 1950), an American historian of the Middle East, is the 'Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies' at Columbia University,[1] and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.
Khalidi was born in New York. He received a B.A. from Yale University, where he was a member of Wolf's Head Society,[2] in 1970,[3] and a D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1974[4] and spent many years as a professor and director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago before joining the Columbia faculty. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Lebanese University, and the American University of Beirut.
Khalidi is married to Mona Khalidi, who is the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.[5] He is a member of the National Advisory Committee of the U.S. Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, which describes itself as "a national organization of Jews, Christians and Muslims dedicated to dialogue, education and advocacy for peace based on the deepest teachings of the three religious traditions."[6]
He is member of the Board of Sponsors of The Palestine-Israel Journal, a publication founded by Ziad AbuZayyad and Victor Cygielman, prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists.
He is founding trustee of The Center for Palestine Research and Studies.
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Princeton University let it be known that it was considering hiring Khalidi in 2005.[7] However, a controversy developed over Khalidi's political involvements and no job offer was made.[8]
Academic work
Khalidi’s research covers primarily the history of the modern Middle East. He focuses on the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, with an eye to the emergence of various national identities and the role played by external powers in their development. He also researches the impact of the press on forming new senses of community, the role of education in the construction of political identity, and in the way narratives have developed over the past centuries in the region.[4] Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as "preeminent in his field."[9] He served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1994. Khalidi is currently editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Much of Khalidi's scholarly work in the 1990s focused on the historical construction of nationalism in the Arab world. Drawing on the work of theorists Benedict Anderson who described nations as "imagined communities", he does not posit primordial national identities, but clearly argues that these nations have legitimacy and rights. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), he places the emergence of Palestinian national identity in the context of Ottoman and British colonialism as well as the early Zionist effort in the Levant. This book won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize as best book of 1997.[10] His dating of Palestinian national emergence to the early 20th century and his tracing of its contours provide a rejoinder to Israeli nationalist claims that Palestinians either do not exist, or had no collective claims prior to the 1948 creation of Israel. Nevertheless, Khalidi is also careful to focus on the late development, failings and internal divisions within the various elements of the Palestinian nationalist movement as well.
In Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004), Khalidi takes readers on a historical tour of Western intervention in the Middle East, and argues that these interventions continue to have a colonialist nature that is both morally unacceptable and likely to backfire.
