ELIAS ANTOINE NAJJAR

AUB engineering professor who kept teaching through fifteen years of civil war

Through fifteen years of civil war, Professor Elias Najjar missed fewer lectures than the weather. He walked to the American University of Beirut every morning from his flat in Ras Beirut, steering around sandbags and craters with a worn leather briefcase under his arm, and on the worst days, when the lecture halls were unsafe, he taught in a basement corridor by the light of a camping lamp, drawing beams and bridges on a portable blackboard.

Born in 1936 in Bhamdoun, a pine-scented village in Mount Lebanon, the son of a stonemason, he studied civil engineering at AUB on a scholarship, took his master's at the University of Illinois and a doctorate at MIT, and returned to Beirut in 1964 to join the faculty. He taught structural engineering for forty years, a patient, wry teacher who told students that a bridge is just a promise made of steel. His former students designed airports, towers and reconstruction projects across Lebanon and the Gulf, and he could still name every one of them. He chaired the department in the 1990s and led the committee that rebuilt the engineering laboratories after the war.

At home he was fond of arak at sunset, chess against anyone brave enough and the scent of jasmine on his balcony. He made a legendary tabbouleh, with parsley chopped finer than seemed possible. His wife, Nadia, a French teacher, died in 2015, and he missed her out loud. He died at home in Beirut on 12 June 2020, aged eighty-four, in a country under lockdown and financial crisis; his son Georges, in Dubai, could not travel and watched the funeral service by livestream. He leaves Georges, his daughter Rima and four grandchildren.

“A bridge is only a promise made of steel. Keep it.”