Rosemary Sayigh

Rosemary Sayigh (née: Boxer; born 1927) is a British-born journalist and scholar of Middle Eastern history. She is known for her works on the Palestinian people, particularly those forcibly displaced to Lebanon as a result of the Nakba.

Personal life
Sayigh was born on 15 March 1927 in the United Kingdom as Rosemary Boxer. She is the elder sister of Mark Boxer, a British journalist. Sayigh met her future husband, Yusif Sayigh, while she was working in Baghdad, Iraq as a teacher. The couple married at the National Evangelical Church in Beirut, Lebanon on 7 October 1953. The couple had four children, including scholar Yezid Sayigh.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Sayigh evacuated from her home in Beirut to stay with her daughter in Cyprus.

Education
Sayigh graduated from the University of Oxford with a BA degree in English Language and Literature in 1948.

She began her MA in sociology and anthropology from the American University of Beirut in 1970. Sayigh's masters' thesis was about the experience of Palestinians displaced to live in Lebanon, based on research and interviews undertaken at refugee camps in or near Beirut. The thesis was accepted in 1976 despite resistance from her thesis advisor, thanks to intervention from a Palestinian history professor at the University.

Sayigh gained her PhD in social anthropology from University of Hull in 1994.

Career
After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1948, Sayigh moved to Italy, first working as an au pair and then as an assistant at a British Institute Library. On her return to London a year later, she struggled to find employment, eventually getting a position at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

In 1952, Sayigh's friend Desmond Stewart found her a teaching job at Queen Aliya College in Baghdad, Iraq. Stewart was a classical scholar teaching in Baghdad at the College of Arts and Sciences at the same time. Sayigh taught at Queen Aliya College for two years, overlapping on the faculty with Palestinian novelist and painter Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. It was while teaching in Iraq that Sayigh first learned of the events of the Nakba, from her Iraqi nationalist friends. In her words, this was 'the beginning of her education in Palestinian history'. After her contract at Queen Aliya College ended and having developed a relationship with her future husband Yusif, Sayigh moved to Beirut, Lebanon to marry and live with him.

In Beirut, Sayigh began working as a journalist. Through visits with her mother-in-law's cousin, Sayigh began interviewing the residents of Dbeyeh camp and sharing the interviews in articles for Kayhan Weekly, The Journal of Palestine Studies and later The Economist. Sayigh stopped writing for the Economist in 1970, when she left due to disgust with the magazine's 'uncritical, pro-American position on the Vietnam War'. In 1979, her first book Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People’s History was published by Zed Books. The original cover photo was one taken by Don McCullin. The first edition of the book included an introduction by Noam Chomsky, who also wrote the foreword to the 2007 edition.

In 1967, Sayigh was a founding member of The Fifth of June Society, an NGO established in Beirut to combat anti-Arab content in Western media. The society was named to commemorate the date on which the Six-Day War began. The society shared information about Palestine and the Palestinian resistance movement. Interested journalists were welcomed, taken on tours of refugee camps in Beirut and given information packs about Palestine. The society also aimed to connect with pro-Palestinian groups across the world.

Between 1983 and 1993, Sayigh worked with Palestinian women in camps in Lebanon, including Shatila camp, on an oral history project. In 1993, her second book, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon was published, also by Zed Books. In 1999, she won an award from the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Foundation to travel through Palestine and record women's accounts of displacement. This work forms the basis of ‘Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement: A Web-based Oral Archive’, recorded in Arabic. Sayigh presented a lecture version of the archive to the 15th International Oral History Association Conference in Prague, Czech Republic in July 2010.

She has been an unofficial supervisor to several PhD candidates researching Palestinian social and political history. Her areas of interest include gender and politics; the political responsibility of the researcher; memory and identity and culture and resistance. From 2000, she was a visiting lecturer in oral history and anthropology at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at the American University of Beirut.

Recognition
In 2009, The Journal of Palestine Studies published a special issue in honour of Sayigh's work, including an article entitled 'A Tribute Long Overdue'. In 2017, Sherna Berger-Gluck's introduction to the November issue of the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies was titled 'Rosemary Sayigh, A Tribute'.

Author

 * Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People’s History (Zed Books, 1979)
 * Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (Zed Books, 1993)
 * Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement (self-published, 2007)

Editor

 * Yusif Sayigh: Arab Economist and Palestinian Patriot: A Fractured Life Story (The American University in Cairo Press, 2015)
 * Becoming Pro-Palestinian: Testimonies from the Global Solidarity Movement (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024)

Contributor

 * 'Afterword', Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine, ed. Diana Allan (Pluto Books, 2021)