Sami Zubaida

We have learned, with sadness, of the passing on 6 April 2025 of Sami Zubaida, an expert in Middle Eastern culture who taught Sociology at Leicester in the 1960s.

Sami Zubaida was born into an Iraqi Jewish family in Baghdad in 1937. At sixteen he came to the UK where he studied for a BA at the University of Hull and then an MA at Leicester. He taught at Leicester from 1963 to 1968, a time when the University’s Sociology Department was considered “the crucible of political sociology”, led by Norbert Elias and including such notable figures as Anthony Giddens and Bryan Wilson

In 1968, Sami moved to Birkbeck where, in 1972, he founded that institution’s Department of Politics and Sociology, together with Bernard Crick and Leicester graduate Paul Hirst. That same year, he became founding editor of the journal Economics and Society. Sami remained at Birkbeck until his retirement in 2004, and continued there as Emeritus Professor for the rest of his life, being appointed to a College Fellowship in 2012.

Sami Zubaida’s twin passions were the religions and food of the Middle East. His books include Islam, the People and the State (1989), A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (1994), Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East (2010) and Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System (2018).