AMPL Honors Ninety-Five-Year-Old Educator Shafiq Geha

Left to right: Nabeel Rahhal, Shafiq Geha, and Dean Maroun Kisrwani

The Anis Makdisi Program in Literature (AMPL) held an honorary ceremony for educator, historian, and writer Shafiq Geha on March 28 at West Hall. The main speakers at the event were Dean of Student Affairs Maroun Kisirwani and former Vice President of International College (IC) Nabeel Rahhal.

Remarking that Geha was his history teacher fifty-five years ago, Dean Kisirwani said that it was his teaching methods that distinguished Geha from other teachers back then. At a time when history was widely perceived as an "easy subject" and generally held in low esteem by most students, Geha was among the few teachers who not only controlled his classes but could also create awe and inspiration among the students. He achieved this by teaching history as a sociopolitical adventure as opposed to merely listing historical events as they unfolded.

Nabeel Rahhal, on his part, outlined the major cornerstones in Geha's life from the time he joined the AUB community in 1943 as a student of history. Geha earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from AUB and later taught in the Social Sciences Department at IC from 1944 until 1980. He was also a member of AUB's Education Department, where he taught hundreds of students between 1954 and 1970 before his retirement in 1980.

As a historian, Geha has written extensively on several historical periods in Lebanon. Since 1991, he has produced four major books: The Struggle of Lebanon's Destiny during the 1918-1945 French Mandate, published in 1995; The Secret Arab Movement, which appeared in 2004; The Lebanese Constitution: Its History Amendments and Current Texts, the fourth edition of which appeared in 2005; and Darwin and the Crisis of 1882 in the Medical Department of the Syrian Protestant College, first published in English by the AUB Press in 2004. At the age of 95, Geha published The Anglicized Arab Musical Composition in 2007.

Rahhal commented that while Geha's long years of rewriting history are still ongoing, Lebanon's history seems sadly enough to be rewriting itself along the same lines that caused much of the country's desolation a few decades back.

The last words in the ceremony were spoken by Geha himself. He described his student experiences and the AUB campus in the 1940s, when men from different countries, ethnicities, and civilizations met and socialized, but were always invariably in bed by ten. "Since then, nightlife in Beirut has certainly changed much," commented Geha.