My friend Amal Treacher Kabesh, who has died aged 67 of multiple causes including diabetes, was a scholar and lecturer whose roots in Egypt informed much of her psychosocial studies research – including two books, Postcolonial Masculinities (2013) and Egyptian Revolutions (2017), which brought together postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist theories to insightful effect.
Amal was born in London, where her father, Ahmed Kabesh, an Egyptian national, had studied for a PhD. Her mother, Anne (nee Chippington), was the daughter of the caretaker at the Egyptian embassy. Amal’s early years were lived in comfortable surroundings in Cairo, where her father became a minister in Nasser’s government; there were ballet classes, an excellent school and visits to Groppi’s cafe. But in 1964, after her parents divorced, she moved back to London with her mother and sister, Amany.
Settling in Thornton Heath, where her mother worked for the gas board, life was very different. After leaving Davidson Road secondary modern school in 1970, Amal studied secretarial skills at Pitman’s, then qualified as a psychiatric nurse, working at the radical psychotherapy residential community at Peper Harow in Surrey. She was accepted in 1981 – without any O- or A-levels – on to a cultural studies degree course at North East London Polytechnic (now University of East London), where she and I met and became friends.
In the summer of 1983 I went with Amal to Cairo to help her look for her father, with whom she had had no contact for 20 years. Armed only with an old address for a friend of Amal’s mother, we hailed a taxi but discovered that in Egypt, new governments change the street names. Despite this, we tracked Ahmed down, and so began Amal’s reconnection with her Egyptian family and with Egypt. Father and daughter were able to re-establish their relationship before Amal returned to Britain to complete her degree and then gain a PhD in psychosocial studies in 1990.
Thereafter Amal had an academic career that included lectureships in sociology at North East London Polytechnic and psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2005 she was appointed as a lecturer in Nottingham University’s sociology department, where she stayed for 17 years. The arc of Amal’s life began and ended in Cairo, where she died only four months after retiring from Nottingham as associate professor.
Amal touched countless lives, of students, colleagues and friends. She wove the threads of her own life into her writing, but more than anything, her experience shaped her boundlessly generous, humane and non-judgmental spirit and commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion that was recognised, in 2022, by the award of Nottingham University’s vice-chancellor’s medal.
In 2005 she married Amir Hawash, who was in the Egyptian military before becoming a tour guide. He survives her, as do Amir’s children from a previous relationship, Fatma, Mohammed, Moustapha and Noha, and her sister Amany.
