Suliman Bashear


Suliman Bashear PhD was a leading Druze Arab scholar, writer, and professor, who taught at Birzeit University, An-Najah National University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bashear was noted for his work on the early historiography of Islam.

Life and education

Bashear was born in the northern Palestinian village of Maghar. Bashear studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his BA and MA. In 1976, he received his PhD at the University of London for his dissertation ‘Communism in the Arab East’, which was published both in Arabic and in English.
He died in October 1991 following a heart attack. In the last six years of his life, he had produced fifteen published articles.

Thesis

Bashear made international headlines when he was injured after allegedly being thrown from a second-story window by his students at the An-Najah National University in Nablus in the West Bank in response to his argument that Islam developed as a religion gradually within the historical context of Judaism and Christianity, rather than being the revelation of a prophet. However, this incident has been denied by Bashear’s wife, Dr. Lily Feidy, where she wrote in an email message, “Please note that Suliman was never attacked or injured by his students; nor was he physically attacked by anybody else. I have been asked this question a million times”.
Bashear's historiography of early Islam considered not only the development of religious customs and beliefs, but also traced how later generations recast the past in order to meet the needs of their own era.
Like the work of Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, John Wansbrough, Yehuda D. Nevo, Martin Hinds, Gerald Hawting, Christoph Luxenberg, Gerd R. Puin, Andrew Rippin, Günter Lüling, and other historiographers of early Islam, Bashear's research challenged what he considered to be the myth of a unified beginning Islam.

Books and articles

Communism in the Arab East: 1918–28. London: Ithaca Press, 1980.Muqaddimah fī at-tārīkh al-ākhar: Naḥ̣ḥwa qirāʾah jadīdah l-il-riwāyah al-Islāmiyyah . Jerusalem, 1984.