Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2018, pp. 73
Compiled by Janet McMahon
Frances Copeland-Stickles, 88, died Jan. 9 in Gaithersburg, MD. From 1952 to 1955 she taught at the American Community School in Beirut, Lebanon, then served as its first-ever librarian. In Lebanon, she learned about the plight of Palestinian refugees and dedicated herself to humanitarian assistance and advocacy. She volunteered for American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) throughout its 50-year history, serving several terms on the board and as founding chair of the educational committee. She authored The Land and People of Jordan with her father, Paul Copeland, Land Between, Flag Balloon (published by the American Educational Trust in 1988), A Crown for Henrietta Maria and Another Sort of Pioneer. Donations in her memory may be made to ANERA’s educational program, 1111 14th St., NW #4, Washington, DC 20005.
Pierre Sioufi, 56, who opened his apartment overlooking Cairo’s Tahrir Square to journalists and protesting Egyptians during the country’s 2011 revolution ousting President Hosni Mubarak, died March 4 of cancer. He was born in Cairo to a wealthy French-speaking Egyptian family. His father, Antoine Sioufi, was an antiques dealer of Iraqi and Greek heritage, and his mother, Maryse-Liliane Soussa, was Lebanese. He attended a Jesuit academy until his mid-teens, when he decided to leave school and educate himself at home instead. In his 20s he enrolled in the American University in Cairo, where he was active in theater and film productions, eventually earning a degree in business administration. He later ran his family’s antique shop and lived a bohemian life, collecting postcards, Egyptian movie posters, picture frames and other objets d’art. Having inherited the downtown Cairo building housing his large apartment, he gave permission to Al Jazeera to put a camera on the roof during the 2011 protests, providing it remained on 24 hours a day. According to his obituary in The New York Times, “He told friends he considered Mr. Mubarak’s ouster a kind of coup by the military, and worried that Egypt’s immature political factions would feud and pave the way for more autocracy. His fears proved prescient.”
Saba Mahmood, 57, a professor, theorist and author, died March 10 of pancreatic cancer at her home in Berkeley, CA. A native of Quetta, Pakistan, she moved to the U.S. in 1981 to study architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. She earned a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago prior to joining the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. There she specialized in sociocultural anthropology, with a focus on modern Egypt, helped found the Berkeley Pakistan Studies Initiative, and was affiliated with its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Program in Critical Theory and the Institute for South Asia Studies. Raised as a Muslim, her scholarship addressed perceptions of secularism and religion, particularly in Muslim countries. In her 2004 book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, she analyzed a 1990s grass-roots movement by religioius Egyptian women focused on moral reform. Her 2015 book, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, challenged the idea that increased secularism would help alleviate social and political inequalities and religious tensions in Muslim societies. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and she was the recipient of many honors and awards.
Don Bustany, 89, died April 23 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA. A native of Detroit, MI, he was a childhood friend of the late radio host Casey Kasem. The two attended Wayne State University together and, after reconnecting in California in 1968, became partners in a company that produced commercials, going on to help launch the hit radio show “American Top 40,” which debuted on July 4, 1970. Bustany, who held a master’s degree in communications, also worked as a technical coordinator for MTM Enterprises, which produced such TV shows as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” an episode of which he directed in 1974. From 1996 to 2014 he was host of the public radio show “Middle East in Focus,” which aired in Southern California on KPFK-FM. “Voices that speak out about the injustices perpetrated by the Israelis upon the Palestinians are almost never heard in our mainstream media,” he explained in one broadcast. “‘Middle East in Focus’ is dedicated to bringing you honest information through honest people—courageous people.” He successfully resisted an attempt in 1997 to put the show on “hiatus,” and regularly offered a subscription to the Washington Report as a premium during the station’s fund-raising drives. He served four terms as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and for many years was a member of ADC’s advisory committee.
Abbas Attar, 74, a photojournalist who documented conflicts around the world, died April 25 in Paris of undisclosed causes. Known professionally simply as Abbas, he was born in Iran’s Baluchistan region, bordering Pakistan, and moved with his family to Algeria when he was 8, experiencing the country’s war for independence from France. “I grew up in a situation of violence,” he said in 2011. He decided to become a journalist at a young age, and got his first major break when the International Olympic Committee hired him to document Mexico’s preparations for the 1968 summer Olympics. He covered the overthrow of the shah of Iran in 1979-80, recalling that his friends “urged me not to show the revolution’s negative side to the world.…I told them that it was my revolution as well, but I still needed to honor my duty as a journalist—or a historian, if you will.” His books include Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask, Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam and Iran Diary, 1971-2002. He went on to examine Christianity, paganism, Buddhism, Hinduism and, at the time of his death, Judaism. “I’m interested in…the political, social, economic, even psychological aspects of religion,” he explained.
