Khalidi is the son of Ahmad Samih Khalidi and Anbara Salam, and the brother of historian Walid Khalidi. His sister is Randa al-Fattal, a Palestinian-Syrian author, playwright and political activist. Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi is Tarif's first cousin. Khalidi's son, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, is a philosophy professor at York University. His daughter, Aliya Khalidi, is a lecturer at the Lebanese American University. The Khalidi family has lived in Jerusalem since the eleventh century and is noted for a long line of judges and scholars. Tarif's father was principal of the GovernmentArab College in Jerusalem from 1925 until 1948. He also served as Deputy Director of Education under the British Mandate. He was the author of several pioneering works on educational theory and on Palestinian history. Khalidi's mother came from a prominent Beiruti political family. She was a pioneer feminist, activist and writer; and the first Muslim woman in Greater Syria to publicly remove her veil in 1927. She also translated several literary works into Arabic, including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and published her memoirs in 1978. Khalidi and his family had to leave their home in April 1948 and sought refuge in Beirut.
Academic career
In 1952, Khalidi attended Haileybury College in Hertford, England where he was on the classical side. He went on to University College, Oxford, where he received a B.A. in Modern History in 1960 and his master's degree three years later. Between 1960 and 1966, he was an instructor of Cultural Studies at the American University of Beirut. Khalidi received a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago in 1970. That year he returned to AUB as an assistant professor in the History Department. He taught at AUB through the Lebanese Civil War with a brief departure from 1985 to 1986 to become a senior research associate at St. Antony's College, Oxford. In 1996 he was named the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge as well as director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies there. He returned to AUB again in 2002 to occupy his current position as Shaykh Zayid Chair at the Center for Arab and Middle East Studies. Tarif Khalidi wrote an influential paper on Palestinian Historiography from 1900 to 1948 in which he argued that much of the historical writing came to centre on the history of the Arabs and of Palestine, in an attempt to re-define the place that Palestine occupied in the Arab world in general and to emphasise its ties to Egypt and Syria in particular.
