(The full text is presented here for the friends and family of Professor Abdallah Schleifer and our readers.)
On March 27th, our longtime friend and passionate supporter of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, Abdallah Schleifer, Senior Fellow at the Arab-West Foundation, passed away in Cairo. He has meant a great deal to Arab-West Report/Dialogue Across Borders, to many of my student interns, and to myself.
Abdallah was born as Marc David Schleifer to a Jewish American family in New York. He was inspired by the beat movement and reading poetry in Greenwich Village, the center of a bohemian artist community that expressed its alienation from conventional society. They advocated personal release, purification, and illumination induced by drugs, jazz, sex, and Zen Buddhism. Marc met with Che Guevara and ventured with other young American volunteers into armed support for the Cuban revolution in the late 1950s. In later years, he visited Morocco and became fascinated by Sufi mysticism, where love for the divine is emphasized, rather than the fear of divine punishment when one does not fully live according to the rules of religion. Marc wasn’t the only beatnik who found his destiny in Sufi Islam. His lifelong friend, scholar, and Sufi master Shems Friedlander (1940-2022), also of Jewish origin, and still others turned to Sufi Islam for spiritual perfection. Upon Marc’s conversion to Islam, he adopted the name Suleyman Abdallah Sharif [Sulaymān ʿAbdullāh Sharīf] and subsequently became known as Abdallah Schleifer.
After a short stint as an armed revolutionary in Cuba, Abdallah ventured into writing and became the Middle East correspondent for Jeune Afrique and special correspondent for The New York Times. During this period, he had a house in the Old City of Jerusalem, at this time held by the Jordanians, overlooking the Temple Mount. During the Six-Day War of 1967, Israeli soldiers entered his house because it was so strategically located. After his time in Jerusalem and Amman, Abdallah became the Washington DC bureau chief for al-Arabiya and later became NBC News Cairo bureau chief for 9 years. In the 1980s, Abdallah, who had no PhD but a towering experience in journalism, became a professor of practice at the American University in Cairo and was requested by the university’s leadership to create a journalism program for which he also needed to do fundraising. Abdallah found the needed support from Sheikh Kamāl Adham, a Saudi businessman and political figure, which resulted in the creation of the Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at AUC in 1988.
My first encounter with Abdallah was when I taught journalism writing at the American University in Cairo (2000-2001). He retired in 2005, but retirement was difficult for him, and he became a lecturer at Future University in Cairo until he was physically unable to continue.
My relationship with Abdallah started to intensify with my reporting about Pope Benedict XVI’s infamous Regensburg lecture (2006) and Abdallah’s involvement in formulating the Muslim response in A Common Word Between Us and You (2007).
Abdallah was astutely aware of and disliked the misuse of religion for political purposes which can be found in all religions. For example, we discussed the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 which inspired Coptic and other political activists to label almost any difficulty for Christians in Egypt as “persecution” in their efforts to advocate US intervention in Egypt and Islamists who use Islam as a tool to mobilize Muslims for their political agenda. Our mutual dislike for the misuse of religion for political objectives created a strong bond.
We both lived through the uprising against President Mubarak in the years Islamists struggled to obtain and maintain power in Egypt (2011-2013). I was impressed by his observations and analysis of developments. While Western media generally adopted the Muslim Brotherhood claim that the massive protests against President Mubarak were a revolution, Schleifer questioned this position. For him protests led to “a coup d’état of an army that had enough of the efforts of Gamal Mubarak to succeed his ailing father.”
Schleifer not only questioned Western reporting about Egypt but also said Egyptians could do a much better job in explaining Egypt’s transition to Western audiences. The blame is not so much on individual Egyptians but the Egyptian government that unlike Israel has not facilitated the setting up of an entity like MEMRI that would provide alternative stories online at no cost to Western readers. The Future University’s International Conference on Middle East Strategic Landscape: 100 years after the First World War (2015), in which both Abdallah and I participated, was memorable. Other universities and organizations in Egypt have organized similar events throughout the years but these efforts are not the same as regular reporting to a large network of connections worldwide.
Misreporting was, for example, evident after the burning of the church under construction in the Upper Egyptian village of Mārīnāb that became the spark that led to the Christian demonstrations in the Maspero district in Cairo that culminated in at least 20 Christian deaths and 100 injured and much negative international media framing about Egypt as a country that persecutes Christians. The complexity and context was not understood, Abdallah argued in 2016, when he used the work of my student Lamīs Yehya about Mārīnāb as an example of how reporting should be done.
In 2016, Abdallah provided feedback on the glossary of Islamic terms in the draft text of our book, From Ruling to Opposition Islamist Movements and Non-Islamist Groups in Egypt 2011-2013. Abdallah explained that the Muslim Brotherhood had adopted Sufi terminology and added to the same concepts a politicized meaning. Such changes in meaning need to be explained to a wider audience, Abdallah argued, which can provide counterarguments to the biased narratives one often hears in the West.
Abdallah was deeply critical of political Islam in meetings with student interns and interviews. Muslim Brothers, he observed, are generally doing a much better job than mainstream Muslims in influencing the dominant Western narratives. In 2016, intern Felix Wellisch, noted Abdallah’s anger about the ways in which ISIS distorted the messages and practices of Islam. He then stated “What we need is a counter jihad.” By “jihad,” Abdallah meant counter arguments, not violence. In 2019, intern Yana Kabirova documented Abdallah’s views that terrorism under the cloak of Islam doesn’t owe its inspiration to orthodox Islam but to other forces.
Abdallah and I knew we had much in common. He had become a Sufi Muslim and a believer in universal truths which meant to him speaking with respect about people with different religious beliefs. I took my Christian heritage with me to Egypt, discovered many commonalities between people adhering to different beliefs and appreciated his belief in universal truths and respect for believers in different traditions.
Abdallah spoke practically no Arabic but had a wide global network with prominent Muslim and political leaders, members of Jordanian royal family, academics, rebels, artists and others.
Both of us discovered an Islam that was very different from the image most people in the West have of the religion. We found each other in our mutual dedication to intercultural and interreligious dialogue. We both opposed using religion in political power struggles, including Western politicians and political activists (often under the cloak of Christianity or Judaism) whipping up fear for Islam for political gain or political Islam using widespread religiosity in the Muslim world for their political agenda with a small minority even turning to terrorism.
Abdallah could speak with fondness about his Orthodox Jewish grandfather, his family origin from Odessa, Ukraine and his contacts with his sister and brother-in-law who remained observant Jews. In 2015-2020, he frequently spoke about his wish to visit Odessa to see where his family had originated but was also afraid to leave Egypt since his residence permit had expired and he feared problems in returning to Egypt after leaving the country. His wish was to die and be buried in Egypt.
Abdallah knew about the myths that helped shape Zionism, opposed the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza and the settler movement that followed since 1974. Abdallah had no sympathy for the relgious Zionist right in Israel or groups supporting them. Neither did he appreciate the Israeli lobby in the USA and gave me the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt (2007).
In 2018, I came to know a secular Jewish-Israeli historian Dr. Ofer Nordheimer Nur who frequently traveled to Egypt and introduced him in 2021 to Abdallah. Both agreed in their critique on Israel’s occupation policies. Dr. Nur showed an interest in writing about Abdallah’s life, an American Jewish beatnik who had become Muslim. Abdallah welcomed Nur’s idea and offered all his support. Nur argues that being Jewish is not about beliefs but also about a certain air to one’s way of interacting and conversing. He believes that Abdallah had retained these characteristics that he believes to be Jewish while others would attribute these characteristics to his time with the beat movement. Ṭayba al-Sharīf, his wife of 18 years, says that the central love in his life was Islam, his Sheikh and the Divine Name of Allah. In my conversations with Abdallah, I also spoke about his faith and challenged him with the ideas of secularist Dr. Mahmoud Khayyal, but while he was open to dialogue he never showed any doubt about his faith.
Abdallah saw beauty in Sufi spirituality. In 2019, my US student intern Chloe-Kate Abel and I tried to grasp his understanding of divinity. Abdallah approved this and other interviews we conducted with him before placement in Arab-West Report and respected that my focus was on the sociological analysis of religion and describing spirituality in sociological terms. Abdallah loved Lara Gibson’s 2022 paper The Tribunal of Love: The Four Stages of Love in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Poetry. Love has always been the central element in Abdallah’s spirituality whereby love is the physical union between man and woman, interpersonal relations between humans and the spiritual between humanity and the Divine.
In March 2023, I last saw Abdallah. He was then residing in Hotel Royal Maadi since better care was provided there and living alone had become too difficult. I remember that one evening he received a group of people from his Sufi tariqa. He had given them a copy of A Common Word Between Us and You. I met with the members of his group, both English-speaking Egyptians and non-Egyptians. Abdallah had ordered food and drinks from the hotel. To me the group looked very similar to what I have seen often in different churches: small group meetings about a certain subject, intended to strengthen each other in the faith.
Abdallah’s focus on love made him a great humanitarian, a man who played a great role in creating mutual understanding between people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. We will greatly miss him.
Cornelis Hulsman
The Hague, April 14, 2025
