Hassan Kobeissi

During his primary education, Hassan was taught Arabic and was made to memorize the Koran under the tutelage of the Sheikh Ali Humani School in Musaytbeh (Beirut).

However, Hassan's translation of Rodinson's "Mohammad" was not published, for the controversial book may have caused more sectarian strife in a country already overtaken by civil war.

Most prominently, Hassan focused his effort on a journal titled "Al-Fikr Al-Arabi" ("The Arab Thought"), for which he was editor for the period of two years.

Hassan won the 1993-1994 prize for the best translation of a book from French to Arabic for his work on Nostalgie des Origines by Mircea Eliade.

In 1968, Hassan Kobeissi, along with some intellectual peers (Ahmad Beydoun, Fawaz Trabulsi, Wadaah Shrara, [...]), were considering founding the leftist Lebanese Marxist party.

Hassan, who was very influenced by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and by socialist Karl Marx, was very critical of the current Lebanese political state.

He was particularly interested in the structural and systemic approach of Anthropology, which led him to translate Claude Lévi-Strauss' Anthropologie Structurale from French to Arabic.

In 1984, Hassan married a Télé Liban news anchor, his close friend and fellow intellectual Ahmad Beydoun's sister.

Hassan enjoyed long walks and mountain hiking, tending to his garden in his village home in Zebdine, making his own wine, and drinking coffee with his friends at the Cafe De Paris in Hamra Street.

Personally, he was known for his reverence of silence, much preferring to listen than to speak, for his pronounced (almost excessive) pride, stubbornness, and sometimes arrogance (he was known to almost never apologize for any action he had committed).