Charles Malik
Charles Habib Malik (Arabic شارل حبيب مالك Scharl Habib Malik, DMG Sarl Habib Maalik; * 1906 in Bitirran, Lebanon, † December 28, 1987 in Beirut ) was the President of the 13th UN General Assembly in 1958.
Life and work
Malik attended the American Mission School for Boys in Tripoli, then graduated from the American University of Beirut. This he finished in 1927 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics. From 1927 to 1929 he taught mathematics and physics there.
The following year he went to the publishing house al -Hilal Cairo, he also worked from 1930 to 1932 for the Department of Schistosomiasis of the Rockefeller Foundation, in a study on the devastating effects of this disease, which is transmitted from snails to humans.
1932 Malik studied in Freiburg, where he began a PhD with Martin Heidegger, but he dropped out in the wake of the transfer of power to Hitler in early 1933. Then he left Germany for the United States, where he completed his studies at Harvard University in 1934 with a doctorate in philosophy.
Together with Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom he was a personal friend, Malik was one of the most influential figures of the Conference of San Francisco, and author of major parts of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose co-author and rapporteur to the UN human Rights Commission, he was with Mrs. Roosevelt.
From 1945 to 1953, Malik Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary General for Lebanon in the United States. He practiced the same function in the time from 1946 to 1953 in Cuba. From 1953 to 1955 he was ambassador to the United States. As of November 18, 1956, he was Foreign Affairs and Minister of Education in Lebanon.
Malik was the representative of Lebanon in the UN Economic and Social Council, of which the second to the eighth session, and in the seventh and eighth session he was its president. He represented his country in the Commission on Human Rights and was its chairman from 1951 to 1952.
Malik spoke fluent English, French, German and Arabic and was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society of International Law. He was often referred to as " Arab philosopher " and wrote numerous articles on scientific, social and philosophical issues, both in the U.S. and Arab magazines.
In his last years, Malik has been witness to the Lebanese civil war. As the only Greek Orthodox politician, he was at the beginning of the war, the founders of the Lebanese Front, a coalition bourgeois- conservative and right-wing forces against left-wing and pro-Palestinian Lebanese National Movement of Kamal Jumblatt. Malik was a member of the anti-communist " Prayer Breakfast Movement ," a now mainly known as The Family evangelical network.
In April 1982, Malik was once again in Germany for a visit, where he had studied half a century earlier in Heidegger to keep in Bonn of the German Society for Foreign Policy a lecture in German language.
Hannah Arendt praised Malik end of the 1940s as a philosopher and as one of the few Arab leaders who were willing to reach out to Israel.