I was born in Baghdad, Iraq and left for England to continue my education at the early age of 16. After completing my General Certificate of Education, I entered Twickenham College of Technology, earning a Diploma in civil engineering in 1966. Two years of hard work on building sites and road construction convinced me to change tracks. In 1968, I enrolled in the Department of Politics at Lancaster University south of the famed Lake District in northern England. It was there that I met Karen, an American exchange student, who later became my wife. After finishing our degrees at Lancaster, we both went ot the London School of Economics where we earned our Ph.D.s in international relations.

My teaching career began at my alma mater, the University of Lancaster. I also taught at Keele University taking up the position of Deputy Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1978. In 1983, the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) awarded me a one-year visiting professorship, and in the following academic year I held concurrent fellowships at Princeton University and the Council on Foreign relations (CFR). By then, Karen, who specializes in Russian and post-Soviet Studies, and I had decided to stay in the United States and fortunately we were able to secure tenured professorships. Mine was at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia where I taught for 15 years before assuming my present position of professor of political science at Miami University of Ohio in 2000. The highlight of these last 20 years was my naturalization as an American citizen in 1990.

I am the recipient of a number of fellowships from the Institute for Strategic Studies and from the British Social Science Research Council, both in the United Kingdom. In the United States, in addition to the fellowships from Princeton and the CFR and the visiting professorship at SAIS, I have received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Philip and Elaine Hampton Fund. In 2004, I was selected as a Carnegie Scholar for the academic year 2004-2005.    

I have published extensively on the comparative and international politics of the Middle East. While of course there is a place for textbooks and pedagogical articles, all my publications are works of scholarship that use extensive primary research, much of it in the original language. My most recent book, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2003) earned glowing reviews from academic journals and magazines and newspapers alike.     

I have also lectured widely at academic institutions around the world. In the United States, I have lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Stanford, Michigan, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Virginia, North Carolina, to name but a few. In Europe, I have lectured at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Edinburgh, Geneva, Amsterdam and Athens among other universities. In the Middle East I have lectured at universities in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco.

I also am just as much engaged in public policy debates in government and the media as I am in the world of scholarship and academia. I have always believed that the knowledge and analytical expertise of academics should be harnessed to help government make politically and morally correct decisions, as well as to educate and inform citizens about public policy. Accordingly I have made frequent presentations at the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, as well as to influential policy think-tanks, such as CFR, Brookings, American Enterprise Institute, Rand, the Carter Center, etc., and at similar institutions in Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, the Netherlands, Japan, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco.                 

I have written articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Cincinnati Enquirer, and International Herald Tribune. I have appeared on British and American television, most frequently on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and have been interviewed regularly by National Public Radio and BBC’s world and domestic services.

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