On June 7, 2025, the world lost Kenneth (Ken) Brown—an early MERIP contributor, journalist and wayward intellectual—after a long illness.

While the name Kenneth Brown may not ring a bell for the current generation of Middle East Studies scholars, Ken was an extraordinary scholar and individual. A graduate of Hollywood High in Los Angeles in 1954, he received his BA from The University of Chicago in 1958 and his PhD from UCLA in 1969.

He began his graduate studies in an Islamic Studies program headed by Gustave von Grunebaum, where he shifted from classical orientalism to social history and anthropology. After a pause, he moved to Morocco in 1965 and considered his options. He decided to write his dissertation on Salé, a port city across the Bou Regreg river from Rabat, the Moroccan capital.  Still a functioning city of the colonial era, Salé turned out to be a wonderful place to conduct a social history of urban Morocco. 

In the summer of 1969, the Brown family moved to Agadir, a coastal city in southern Morocco, which, at the time, was struggling with reconstruction after the devastating 1960 earthquake. While there, he wrote a series of essays on Berber texts in tashelhit and on the Sous valley.

In 1971, Brown accepted a job in the Social Anthropology department at the University of Manchester. A few years later, he moved to the Sociology Department run by Peter Worsley.

In 1976, he published his first monograph, People of Salé, Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City (Harvard University Press). A remarkable work of historical anthropology, it focused upon the artisans and workers of Salé just as they were disappearing at the end of the 1960s. It is backed by capacious notes about the artisans and guilds of Salé drawn from a decade of research. A French translation was published in 2001: Les gens de Salé: Tradition et changement dans une ville marocaine de 1830 à 1930.

After retiring from Manchester in 1992, at age 56, Brown moved to Paris, where he launched a bilingual journal, Mediterraneans with his friend, journalist Robert Waterhouse. It explored the culture and history of the postcolonial Mediterranean one port city at a time. With no financial angels hovering in the background, each issue depended upon a group of place-specific donors. Schmoozer, recruiter, editor, he would set up shop in each port for months and uncover a new team of contributors, artists, photographers and friends—even food writers from time to time.

Mediterraneans culminated its 20 years of existence with a special final issue on Mediterranean mothers that transgressed the geographical boundaries of the previous 14 issues. All 15 issues of Mediterraneans can be savored online.

An original MERIP subscriber, Brown wrote many essays on Palestine/Israel from the 1980s forward. Those interested in tracing how Israeli policies of occupation and apartheid have shaped Palestinian political and social life should begin with his excellent 1982 essay “Journey through the Labyrinth: A Photographic Essay on Israel/Palestine.” Written prior to the first intifada, it provides a grounded lens into the enduring structures of Israel’s everyday occupation. It was published in Visual Communication, (Spring 1982), with the photographs of Jean Mohr. The whole report is available online.

His work relentlessly addressed Israeli power and its abuses—a perspective shaped by time spent in the country, beginning with a semester in 1956. In the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, for example, he published a pertinent analysis rejecting ethnic caricatures of Likud’s rise, showing instead how the party capitalized on Mizrahi marginalization and tracing its structural continuities with Labor in terms of settlement expansion and military aggression. There were many such MERIP essays. Brown also wrote in French about the Palestine question.

Amid a brilliant, expansive and unpredictable career, Brown lived life fully, leaving behind dozens of articles and at least three book manuscripts. 

[Edmund (“Terry”) Burke III is research professor of history and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.]