Personal Life
Ashrawi was born to Palestinian Christian parents on October 8, 1946 in the city of Nablus, British Mandate for Palestine, now part of the West Bank. Her father, Daoud Mikhail, was one of the founders of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Her family later moved to Ramallah, where she attended the Ramallah Friends Girls School. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in literature in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut. While a graduate student in literature at the American University in Beirut she dated Peter Jennings of ABC News who was then stationed there as ABC's Beirut bureau chief. When the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, Ashrawi as a 22 year-old student in Lebanon, was declared an absentee by Israel and denied re-entry to the West Bank. For the next six years, Ashrawi traveled and completed her education gaining a Ph.D. in Medieval and Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia. Ashrawi was finally allowed to re-join her family in 1973 under the family reunification plan.
On August 8, 1975 she married Emil Ashrawi (born 1951), a Christian Jerusalemite who is now a photographer and a theater director. Together they have two daughters, Amal (born 1977) and Zeina (born 1981).
Ashrawi received an Honorary Doctoral Degree at the American University of Beirut on June 28, 2008 as part of an award ceremony coinciding with the university's 139th commencement. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Palestine Studies.
Ashrawi holds honorary degrees from Earlham College and Smith College.
Ashrawi is a passionate advocate of many human rights and gender issues. She is the recipient of numerous international peace, human rights and democracy awards, such as the Olof Palme Award, the Defender of Democracy Award, the Jane Addams International Women's Leadership Award, the Distinguished Alumna Award of the University of Virginia Women's Center, the Distinguished Lifetime Achievements AUB Alumni Award, and the Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Peace and Reconciliation.
Ashrawi is a non-practicing Anglican.
On September 26, 2009, in an interview on Riz Khan’s One on One on Al Jazeera English, Ashrawi defined her current role in the following way: "I think of myself essentially as a human being with a multidimensional mission. Basically, I am a Palestinian, I am a woman, I am an activist and a humanist, more than being a politician. And at the same time I feel that quite often things are thrust upon us rather than come as a result of a calm and deliberate choice."
Read more about this topic: Hanan Ashrawi
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