Professor Mohammed Shaheen

Circa 1999, Professor Mohammed Adnan Al-Bakheet, Al-al-Bayt University President

gave me a book he had received form its author and told me to summerise and review it for him. The book was George Meredith's letters, edited by Mohammed Shaheen whom I learned to be Professor of English Literature in Mota University. I had already been familiar with Shahenn's name as member of the editorial board of PAIDEUMA, a journal devoted to Ezra Pound. Later I wrote Professor Shaheen a letter inquiring about the Pound scholar Hugh Kenner to whom I had written a letter inquiring about Caid Ali mentioned in one of Pound's poems, but I didnt receive a reply from Kenner. Shaheen telephoned me from Mota and informed me that Kenner was in a coma, hence no reply from him. A few months later, the Samuel Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn of University of California-Davis told me that Kenner had died. Another communication with Professor Shaheen was when I sent him a copy of the JAMES JOYCE JOURNAL which was a special issue on Joyce and Moslem culture. Last year, Professor Husam Al-Khateeb and I talked about Shaheen and Al-Khateeb complained that Shaheen was not responding to his communications. Al-Khateeb was a class-mate of Omar son of Ezra Pound in Cambridge in mid-1950s.