Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2017, pp. 79-80
Compiled by Nathaniel Bailey
Boulos A. Malik, 89, died Dec. 21, 2016 in Chagrin Falls, OH of kidney failure associated with diabetes. An Egyptian Copt, he first worked as a stringer for Reuters covering the U.N., then became a broadcaster for the VOA Arabic Service, where he met his wife, fellow VOA broadcaster Madelyn Fay. Malik’s 37-year career as the first Arab-American U.S. Foreign Service Officer included working for the U.S. Information Service and VOA in Greece, Jordan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Morocco, and serving as deputy director and acting director for USIA’s Near Eastern, North African and South Asian Bureau in Washington, DC.
After retiring in 1989, he was asked to work as a U.N. elections monitor in Bosnia, Cambodia and Haiti, and to author U.S. State Department advisory opinions on asylum cases for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. He also taught a course on “The Media in National Security” at the U.S. National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. In 2001 he was asked to serve as the counselor for public affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen because of his regional expertise and native Arabic.
Malik was pre-deceased by his wife and is survived by his sons, Paul, currently U.S. consul general in Dubai, and Peter, sports agent for PGA Tour players of Chagrin Falls, and three grandchildren.
Dr. Landry Thomas Slade, 86, died April 7 in Kirkland, WA. After earning a Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of Virginia, Dr. Slade and his wife, Virginia, moved the following year to Beirut, Lebanon, where he taught chemistry at the American University of Beirut until 1975. He subsequently became associate dean of AUB, then acting dean of arts and sciences, and ultimately assistant to the AUB president. In 1985, after nearly 26 years in Lebanon, Slade worked at AUB’s New York office, where he continued to serve as assistant to the president of the university until his retirement in 1995.
For many years, he also was a member of the board of trustees of the American Community School in Beirut, from which his children graduated. He felt a strong loyalty to both AUB and ACS, and served them during his time in Lebanon, including the hard years of the country’s civil war. Dr. Slade was predeceased by his wife Virgina, and is survived by his wife Gretchen, three children, Lyell, Lawrence and William, and four grandchildren.
Diane Rose Cooper, 74, of Plymouth, MI and Leesburg, FL, died May 3, 2017 after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. Cooper volunteered and later taught at Headstart preschools, and also helped jailed mothers record books for their children to listen to. We asked her beloved husband of 50 years, Larry, how she became an activist for justice in Palestine-Israel, and this is what he wrote:
We watched TV news coverage of what became known as the Six-Day War in June 1967. A few months later, a Palestinian named Mubadda Suidan (another long-time Washington Report subscriber and contributor) joined an engineering firm where I worked in Urbana, IL and we both attended UI graduate school. Suidan was born in Haifa, but as the Zionist militia approached Haifa in 1948, when he was 13 years old, his family fled to Beirut, expecting to be able to return in a couple of days. Diane worked with Suidan, typing up his Ph.D. thesis.
Suidan was an avid reader and eager to share his knowledge with anyone who would listen. He frequently brought into the office news clippings written by John Cooley, Middle East correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. He presented us with several books by Prof. Walid Khalidi. As president of the UI Organization of Arab Students, Suidan brought many speakers to the campus, including the anti-Zionist Rabbi Elmer Berger.
By the early ’70s Diane and I were well versed on the Palestinian perspective of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Over the following years we followed the issue, continued to read more books, attended many speaking events, supported various organizations, and subscribed to publications like the Washington Report.
In 1990, we attended the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Milwaukee, WI and met Rev. David Van Strien, president of UUs for Justice in the Middle East, and subsequently joined UUJME. In 2000, we joined the First UU Congregation of Ann Arbor. About a year later we attended a forum in which several members of our congregation shared what they had learned from a recent trip to Israel. It was obvious to us that they had been given a distorted view of the conditions Palestinians were forced to live with. We felt we needed to correct that distorted picture, and talked with several other members of our church who agreed to join us in forming a committee to work on informing the congregation on the realities of the Palestine-Israel issue. We also worked with other groups in Ann Arbor. In 2007 I joined UUJME’s Board of Directors and was president of the Board from 2011 through 2016.
Over the years we worked with and supported many organizations and individuals working for peace with justice in Palestine. Diane had a bachelor’s degree in education and was especially passionate about children’s education. She was an active supporter of the “No Way to Treat a Child” campaign. Diane was an excellent non-judgmental listener, which resulted in others listening to her views on the Middle East with an open mind.
Diane Cooper is survived by Larry, their son, David, and daughter, Jennifer Chichester, and grandchildren.
Denys Johnson-Davies, 94, died May 22 in Cairo. Known as one of the first, and most prominent, translators of Arabic literature into the English language, he was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but spent most of his childhood in Egypt and Sudan, with brief stints in Uganda and Kenya. It was during this period that he first learned Arabic, although he quickly forgot it when he returned to England at the age of 12, after contracting amoebic dysentery. He began to study Arabic again as a teenager. After graduating from Cambridge University at the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Arabic Section of the BBC, where he was exposed to Arabic as a living, spoken language.
After the war ended, Johnson-Davies moved to Cairo, where he worked for the British Council teaching translation at the British Institute. It was during this period that he began socializing with Egyptian writers and developed a love of Arabic literature. Over the course of the next 50 years he published many English-language collections of Arabic literature, working with such prominent writers as Tayeb Salih, Zakaria Tamer and Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1988 won the Nobel Prize for Literature. To supplement his income Johnson-Davies held many other jobs as well, including first secretary of the British mission in Dubai in 1969, when he served as an interpreter in the negotiations leading to the creation of the United Arab Emirates from the seven former Trucial States.
Maryam Mirzakhani, 40, died July 14 of cancer in Palo Alto, CA. The Stanford mathematics professor was the first and so far the only woman—or Iranian—to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, often seen as equivalent to the Nobel Prize. As a young girl growing up in Iran, Mirzakhani dreamed of becoming a writer. In high school she realized her affinity for solving mathematical problems. She first gained international recognition as a teenager, winning gold medals at the International Math Olympics in Hong Kong in 1994 and in Toronto in 1995. After earning her bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in 1999, she began work on her doctorate at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. in 2004. Until 2008, she was a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. She then joined the mathematics faculty of Stanford University, where she taught until her death.
Rula Quawas, 57, died July 25 in Amman, Jordan of complications during a biopsy that resulted in the rupturing of her aorta. A prominent academic and champion of women’s rights and advancement in Jordan, she was acutely aware growing up of the patriarchal society in which she lived. Not until 1974, when she was 14, were women given the right to vote in Jordan. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English language and literature from the University of Jordan, she went on to receive a doctorate in American literature and feminist theory from the University of North Texas. She subsequently became an associate professor at the University of Jordan, where she was the first academic to introduce courses in feminism and, in 2006, founded the university’s Women’s Studies Center. In 2012, Quawas and her students launched a video project aimed at combating sexual abuse and harassment in Jordan. The video provoked a debate throughout the university. As a result of the negative publicity in the Jordanian news media, Quawas was removed from her post as a dean of the faculty of foreign languages, but was allowed to continue teaching. The Middle East Studies Association of North America sent a letter to high-ranking Jordanian government officials asking that she be reinstated, but the university stood behind its decision.
Dr. Ruth Pfau, 87, died Aug. 10 in Karachi, Pakistan. A German nun who became known as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan,” she spent more than 50 years serving Pakistan’s leprosy patients. A native of Leipzig, Germany, she and her family fled to West Germany after World War II to escape Soviet occupation and enable her to pursue a medical career. She studied medicine at the universities of Mainz and Marburg before joining the Catholic order of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, the organization that would send her to work in India in 1960. Due to visa issues, however, Pfau was delayed in Pakistan, where she visited a leprosy colony and treatment facility that so distressed her that she refused to leave. Under Pfau’s leadership, the facility that she first visited became the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre, a national center of medical professionals who worked to house, treat and recuse victims of leprosy. Although she was not widely known in the West, Pfau was revered in Pakistan for her devotion and dedication to halting the spread of the disease.
