Hussein Ibish


Hussein Yusuf Kamal Ibish is a Senior Resident Scholar at The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He was a Fellow at the former American Task Force on Palestine. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is active in advocacy for Arab causes in the United States. He is a weekly columnist for NOW Lebanon. He describes himself as an agnostic from the Muslim-American community.

Background and education

Ibish was born in Beirut, Lebanon. He comes from an academic background. His father, Yusuf Ibish, studied at Harvard University's Department of Government in the 1950s and was on the faculty of the American University of Beirut as a scholar of Islam. His father and mother were devout Sunni Muslim and Anglican Christian, respectively, although he never embraced either religion. Ibish attended Emerson College, earning a bachelor of science degree in mass communications in 1986. He has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Career