Said K. Aburish, Palestinian Journalist, Dies at 77
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Version 0 of 1. Said K. Aburish, an American-educated Palestinian journalist who drew on his experience as an arms dealer in the Middle East to write 11 books on the region, including a portrait of three generations of his sprawling family and indictments of Arab rulers, died on Aug. 29 in Bethany, a West Bank village controlled by the Palestinian Authority. He was 77. The cause was heart failure, his cousin Amer Aburish said. He had been treated for Parkinson’s disease in the last few years. Mr. Aburish’s writing was notably blunt. He accused Arab leaders of being “stooges” of Western powers and indifferent to the well-being of their citizens. “There are no legitimate regimes in the Arab Middle East,” he declared. He described King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who died in 2005, as “a lazy, corrupt, ignorant drunk” addicted to video games. He called the kingdom “a rotting carcass.” Reviewing his book “A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite,” published in 1997, the Middle East correspondent Kathy Evans wrote in the British newspaper The Observer that Mr. Aburish had proved to be more “traumatizing” to some Arab states than Salman Rushdie, the author who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad irreverently and gone into hiding to escape an Islamic death decree. “For several decades now,” Ms. Evans wrote, Mr. Aburish “has been making Arab governments wince with pain and embarrassment.” She continued: “Why? Because among Arab authors, he is almost alone in speaking the truth.” Other reviewers accused him of hyperbole. The Middle East historian Daniel Pipes wrote in Commentary that “A Brutal Friendship” could be read as “the slightly deranged musings of one out-of-touch intellectual.” But he allowed that “outlandish as it may be, the book represents a main line of Arab thinking.” The scholar William B. Quandt, writing in Foreign Affairs, said Mr. Aburish’s 1995 book, “The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud” was “long on speculation.” Mr. Aburish reported facts and interpretations that were essentially truisms in the Arab world but often novel to Western readers. He detailed the billions of dollars that the Saudis squandered on arms. He reported how the insurgency against the American-backed Iraqi government after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was fueled by ancient religious and tribal divisions. He wrote that Arab populations did not object to Iraq’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction because Israel had nuclear arms. “My books constitute footnotes to the history of the modern Middle East, essentially a revisionist history,” he said in an interview with the reference work Contemporary Authors. “My purpose is to correct certain impressions before it becomes too late.” Mr. Aburish’s “Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family” (1988) told of three generations of his family, beginning with a grandfather, who bought land that was said to have been the site of Lazarus’s tomb and became rich off it by charging admission. The grandfather became leader of the village and its first citizen to move from a cave to a modern house. Mr. Aburish’s father, Abu Said, a journalist, worked in Beirut for Time magazine and other news organizations. As a young man, Abu Said joined the Arab underground to fight British rule and once botched an assignment to kill a British official. Years later he referred to himself as “the most inept assassin in history.” The Bethany book views historical events through the perspective of the Aburish family as it scattered in search of freedom and fortune, its members settling in 22 countries. In her review in The New York Times Book Review, the Arab author Inea Bushnaq wrote of Mr. Aburish, “Some of the truths he reveals make unhappy reading, but ultimately it is his book’s brusque frankness that gives it value.” Said Khalil Aburish was born in Bethany on May 1, 1935. He graduated from Princeton and earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He worked as a reporter for Radio Free Europe, then served in the United States Army. After becoming an American citizen in 1958, he wrote for the London newspaper The Daily Mail. In the 1970s, he and a colleague became business consultants in the Middle East. He also helped negotiate arms deals among Western and Arab nations, particularly Iraq. In one unsuccessful venture, in 1975, he tried to arrange for Iraq to buy a Canadian nuclear reactor. By the 1980s, he wrote, he had become disillusioned with Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and stopped working with him. Returning to writing in 1983, Mr. Aburish sold articles to newspapers and magazines, appeared on British television and began writing books. His 1985 book, “Pay-Off: Wheeling and Dealing in the Arab World,” drew heavily on his business experience in the region. Mr. Aburish also wrote biographies of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat (1998), Hussein (2000) and the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (2004). He called Nasser the Arab world’s “most charismatic leader since the Prophet Muhammad,” and lamented his failure to unite Arabs as one nation. Mr. Aburish’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughter, Charla, as well as a granddaughter, four brothers and two sisters. After living in London and Nice, France, he retired to Bethany in 2009. |