Obituary | BRISMES Member Sami Zubaida (1937-2025)

Born in Baghdad, Sami graduated from the University of Hull and joined Birkbeck College in 1968 until his retirement in 2004. During his career and after retirement, Sami held several visiting positions in Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Paris, Berkeley and New York University. At Birkbeck, he established the Department of Politics and Sociology with Paul Hirst and Bernard Crick and became one of the founding editors of the prestigious journal Economy and Society. Sami was distinguished among an earlier generation of British scholars of the Middle East who transformed area studies into a politically engaged and critical field of investigation on the politics and societies of the region, after the end of Britain’s colonial venture in the 1960s and before the Orientalist and postmodernist turn in the social sciences of the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1970s, with Roger Owen, Talal Asad and David Seddon, he established the Hull or Middle East Study group, initially a left leaning collective of scholars which is still meeting today fifty years on.

Inspired by classic sociological theories, Marxist analysis and a profound knowledge of the Middle East, Sami was a scholar of unusual intellectual breadth and curiosity who has left an extensive and far-reaching body of work.  Although Sami’s many publications and lecturing extended to food, drink and conviviality cultures, Islam remained central to his academic and intellectual life. His Islam, the people and the state: Political ideas and movements in the Middle East, first published in 1989, is still a must in reading lists for undergraduate and postgraduate courses worldwide. In this collection of essays, Sami lays out the main arguments against Islamic exceptionalism and essentialism that were to characterize his later work on Islam, advocating for the need to contextualize its evolution and political manifestations within the historical dynamics of the nation state, secularism and modernity.  At the heart of the conception of this volume was the Iranian revolution of 1979, a seismic event that had a lasting impact on Sami’s intellectual trajectory. In Beyond Islam: a new understanding of the Middle East (2011) Sami followed the development of ‘global’ Islam, arguing that transnational Islamist movements were profoundly embedded in the nation states in which they were born, despite their claims to universality. Sami’s quest to de-essentialize Islam is pursued further in his 2003 Law and power in the Islamic world where he forensically dissects how the application of the Shariah law in Iran and Egypt essentially accommodated the workings of the modern state.

In his lifetime, his writings had already endured the test of time for clarity of language, in-depth historical analysis and a sharp conceptual framework able to combine granular detail with a rigorous understanding of Middle Eastern politics and society at a macro level.  After his death, his intellectual and political legacy is expected to grow even further among his colleagues and friends, and the several generations of students and mentees inspired by Sami’s political commitment, intellectual sharpness, and by his inquisitive and relentlessly generative intellect, always ready to question received wisdom.  Sami’s work has been translated in several European and non-European languages, including Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew. He always kept an eye on his beloved Iraq and its troubled politics, writing on and debating with fervor communalism and cosmopolitanism as a Baghdadi Jew who lived most of his life in exile.  

Nelida Fuccaro, New York University Abu Dhabi