Rifa‘at Ali Abou-El-Haj (1933–2022): A Pioneering Palestinian Scholar

Abstract

Born in Jerusalem in 1933, Rifa‘at A. Abou-El-Haj attended the Friends School in Ramallah from 1949 to 1952, when he immigrated to the United States. He graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1956 and received his PhD in History and Oriental Studies at Princeton University in 1963 with a dissertation entitled “The Reisülküttab and Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz.” In 1967, Abou-El-Haj published select conclusions from his dissertation in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. While he was still at graduate school, Abou-El-Haj started teaching at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. In 1964, he moved jobs to Long Beach State College, which became California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), in 1972. In the early years of his career, he worked on the period that immediately followed the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) and published “The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in Europe: 1699-1703.” He also flirted with psychohistory very briefly in “The Narcissism of Mustafa II (1695-1703): A Psychohistorical Study.” During the 1970s, his interests shifted to new sociopolitical structures that arose in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ottoman world, as evidenced by “The Ottoman Vezir and Paşa Households 1683-1703: A Preliminary Report,” which laid down one of the central arguments in his work: the growth of a new political elite that challenged the centrality of the sultan and his household. During this decade, he seems to have grown increasingly frustrated both with traditional approaches to Ottoman history and with newer approaches that he found lacking in theoretical grounding. While reviewing the first volume of Stanford Shaw’s History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, he wrote: