al-Masīrī, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Woltering, Robbert
Leiden
Brill
(932 words)
The Egyptian scholar and public intellectual ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Masīrī (Abdelwahab Elmessiri, 1938-2008) was arguably the Arab world's pre-eminent expert on Judaism, Zionism, and Israel from the 1990s until his death. Al-Masīrī was born in 1938 into a provincial bourgeois family in Damanhūr, in Lower Egypt. He studied English at Alexandria University and Columbia University, New York, and took his doctoral degree from Rutgers University in 1969, with a thesis on the romantic poets Wordsworth (d. 1850) and Whitman (d. 1892). In 1988 he was