An academic and diplomat

Charles H. Malik was born in 1906 to Dr Habib Malik and Zarifa Karam in a small Koura district village known as Bterram in Lebanon when the country was under French Mandate. He was educated at the American Mission School for Boys, which eventually became the Evangelical School in Tripoli, before enrolling at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1929.

That year, Charles travelled to Cairo where he developed an interest in philosophy but moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States in 1932 to study under Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. An interest in the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who taught at Freiburg, prompted the young man to live in Germany for a year, although he returned to Harvard to complete a doctorate in 1937. Writing a significant thesis on the metaphysics of time in the philosophies of Whitehead and Heidegger, Malik taught at several universities in the US before returning to Lebanon in 1938. He found a new home at AUB, where he established the department of philosophy and the popular cultural studies programme. In 1945, president Bisharah Al Khoury asked him to represent Lebanon at the San Francisco inaugural conference that drafted the United Nations Charter, which quickly led to his appointment as concurrent ambassador to the US. Between 1945 and 1955, he served as a diplomat at the UN, the US, Venezuela and Cuba. Malik left a positive legacy in Washington. An avid critic of communism at the height of the Cold War, he defended Lebanese and Arab interests in the American capital but especially in New York where he made a name for himself.

Upon his return to Beirut, Malik was appointed minister of foreign affairs (1956-1958) and minister of national education and fine arts (1956-1957). He was elected to parliament from the Koura region and served between 1957 and 1960, a term that was interrupted by his return to New York, when Dr Malik presided over the 13th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Malik died in Beirut on December 28, 1987, of complications due to kidney failure, although he also suffered from cardiac disease. His son, Habib Malik, became a prominent academic and human rights activist in his own right.