Najeeb Mitry Saleeby

Najeeb Mitry Saleeby (1870-1935) was a Lebanese-American physician who served the U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines and who became an expert on and advocate for the Muslim population of the region.

He continued his graduate studies at the same institution and became an instructor of medicine, where he developed skills as a surgeon and administrator, in addition to having roles as an educator, historian, scientist, linguist, and ethnologist.

His brother Fuad Saleeby became a clerk in the U.S. Bureau of Public Works in 1910 and later, with Murad, bought a coal mine which Japanese forces seized during World War II.

His first deployment was to Cuba, where he was posted to Camp Columbia for a year and a half, conducting autopsies and anatomical research in the field of tropical diseases.

[7] He also convinced the school Executive Council to allow pupils to study the Qur’an so that Moro children would be able to understand, rather than solely read, the Arabic text.

He rejected the idea in his writings that the Muslims of the Philippines were savages and religious fanatics, and maintained that the U.S. government should be working more closely and collaboratively with local Moro elites.

He persistently sought out Moro manuscript sources that provided insights on subjects including their migration patterns, legal system, history, and religion.

[9][10] In 2018, the Filipino researcher, Renan Laru-an, who originally comes from Mindanao, curated an exhibit at the Sharjah Art Foundation that included a feature on the life and career of Najeeb Saleeby.

[11] Called A Tripoli Agreement, the show focused primarily on relations between Southeast Asia and the Middle East vis-a-vis travel and networks.

[12] The exhibit commemorated Saleeby as an expert on the Muslim culture of the Moro people whose scholarship “has provided an alternative to the Spanish and American discourse of twentieth-century Philippine history.”[13] In an assessment of his career, the anthropologist Thomas McKenna concluded that Najeeb Saleeby envisioned and called for the ethnogenesis of "Morohood", which would entail a unified Filipino Muslim identity.