Foreign News: WITH AN AIR OF DIVINITY

As the 13th U.N. General Assembly opened in Manhattan last week, Lebanese Foreign Minister Charles Malik shook off the last-minute challenge of the Nasser-led Arab League, which put forward the Sudan’s Foreign Minister as a rival “Arab” candidate, and with strong backing from the U.S. won election as Assembly President by a comfortable 45-to-31 vote.

Early Life. Born Feb. 11, 1906, son of a village doctor, amid the mountains and olive groves of northern Lebanon where, he says, “life is innocent and full of joy.”

Personality. Husky, bushy-haired, with a profile straight off an ancient Persian frieze, he looks like an Arabian king but talks like a professor of philosophy. His conversation, resounding and serious in any of four languages (Arabic, English, German, French), is punctuated methodically by the 1-2-3 and a-b-c of the lecturer. He is a Christian (Greek Orthodox), reads the Lord’s Prayer and Creed regularly in Arabic at Sunday worship at his local church in Beirut, cons St. John Chrysostom for relaxation. His wife was formerly a teacher of literature at a Beirut women’s college; they have one son, Habib, 4.

Academic Life. Graduating from the American University of Beirut in 1927, he taught math and physics there for two years. Inspired by a gift of Professor Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, he worked for three years to raise enough money to get to Harvard and study under Whitehead himself. After getting his Ph.D., he taught philosophy at Beirut from 1937 to 1945. Said the great Whitehead: “One of those extraordinary individuals who had a kind of air of divinity about him.”

Political Career. Named the republic of Lebanon’s first minister to Washington and delegate to the U.N.’s founding conference in San Francisco, he helped draft the U.N. Covenants on Human Rights, won a name in the U.S. as “the good Malik” to distinguish him from Russia’s U.N. Delegate Jacob Malik. Returning in 1955 to his Beirut university post, he was called back to public life as President Chamoun’s Foreign Minister after the Suez crisis, charged with carrying out a policy that allied Lebanon more closely with the West than ever before. Though he is careful not to say so publicly, privately he is known to consider Nasser a sincere man who is dangerously provincial, unaware of and indifferent to values of freedom that civilized men, both East and West, have developed and that Malik himself cherishes. Often accused by fellow Arabs of being a “Western stooge,” Malik enjoys far great prestige abroad than in his own country, where he commands no important political following.

Ideas & Principles. Philosopher Malik calls himself “an Aristotelian realist.” He believes profoundly that man exists by religious faith. He is probably the only Foreign Minister who ever urged Westerners to “love” the people of the Middle East as a basis of their foreign relations. In one U.N. speech, he criticized the Communists for “the spiritual enslavement” of man but at the same time condemned the West for being “repulsively materialistic.” If the “wonderful springs of the mind and the spirit in American existence” can “be tapped and mediated to the rest of the world,” says Malik, a “spiritualized materialism” might grow up to embody Western life and faith and provide the saving answer to Communism.