Until recently, Dr. Mahmood Ibrahim was a Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) where he taught courses on Islam, the Middle East and North Africa, and Historiography on the undergraduate and graduate levels.

In addition to teaching, he represented the History Department in the Cal Poly Pomona Academic Senate for several three-year terms and chaired several Senate committees, including the Academic Programs Committee, the Faculty Affairs Committee, and the General Education Committee and co/Chaired the Curriculum Conversion Committee tasked with converting the General Education courses as well as the general curriculum from Quarter to Semester system. He also served as the Chair of the History Department for two terms from 1996-2004. He was awarded the Hart Award for Outstanding Faculty Leadership in 2017.

Born as a refugee in the West Bank town of Ramallah few months after the Nakba, when his family and the whole village of Jimzu were driven out by Zionist militias. Mahmood Ibrahim immigrated to the United States in 1966 and lived in New York City’s Lower East Side. He received his BA from the City College of New York in 1973. Dr. Ibrahim then moved to Los Angeles and attended UCLA from which he received his MA in 1974 and Ph. D. degree in 1981. As a scholar of Middle Eastern Studies, he was awarded several Fulbright Grants and National

Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships to conduct research in Cairo and Damascus. He

participated in several summer seminars funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

(Islamic Science at Columbia University; Just War and Jihad at Rutgers University, and St. Francis of Assis and his Time in Siena, Italy).

Dr. Ibrahim taught as a visiting lecturer at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside before he went to Bir Zeit University where he became Chair of the Department of History, Geography and Political Science from 1985-1989, most notably during the first

Intifada when the University and teaching went underground!

He is the author of two books; Merchant Capital and Islam (University of Texas Press, 1991) and The Oral History of the Intifada (In Arabic with Tom Ricks and Adel Yahya). He is the author of numerous book reviews and articles on early Islamic history including “The Abbasid Mihna/Religious Inquisition as Social Policy” and “Naskh: The Social Origins of Qur’anic

Abrogation”. He also authored several articles on medieval Damascus including “Health and Hygiene in Early Mamluk Damascus”, and “Writing Women’s Lives: Turning Obituaries into Life Histories.”