Rosemarie Said Zahlan

Rosemarie Janet Said Zahlan (Arabic: روزماري سعيد زحلان, romanized: Rawzimārī Saʿīd Zaḥlān; 20 August 1937 – 10 May 2006) was a Palestinian-American historian and writer on the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, based in London. She was a sister of Edward Said and Jean Said Makdisi. In addition to her books, she also wrote for the Financial Times, The Middle East Journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam.

Biography

Rosemarie Janet Said was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1937. Her father, Wadie, was a wealthy Anglican Palestinian businessman and a US citizen, while her mother, Hilda, was born in Nazareth to a Palestinian-Lebanese family. She attended Bryn Mawr College in the United States, studying musicology.

Afterwards, Said Zahlan taught in Cairo. She then went to Beirut, where she lectured on cultural history at the American University of Beirut and the Beirut College for Women. After Beirut, she went to London to get her PhD (about the Red Sea route to India and its 18th-century history pioneer, George Baldwin) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, receiving the degree in 1968. She was also an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. Said Zahlan lived in London for nearly 4 decades.

She married Antoine "Tony" Zahlan, a Palestinian physicist and academic from Haifa. Together they championed the Gaza Library Project, supplying books to Palestine. Rosemarie Said Zahlan was also a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Britain.