Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual

Hisham Sharabi was a distinguished Palestinian intellectual and an outspoken critic of traditional Arab society and culture. Despite his upbringing as a member of the privileged class, his conscious self-analysis after the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel led him to radically change his former bourgeois outlook on his society and its culture. Embers and Ashes tells of Sharabi’s childhood and boyhood in Palestine, his youth and initial political activism as a university student in Lebanon, and his life and education as a graduate student in the US. He brings his newly acquired self-analysis and sociocultural criticism to bear on the story of each of these phases. Although Sharabi wrote many acclaimed books in English and Arabic expressing his insights into the flaws of Arab societal structure, culture, and politics, it is his autobiography, Embers and Ashes, first published in Arabic in 1978, that offers a candid, poignant, and engrossing account of his own personal formation and development.