AMALID was founded in December of 2000 as an attempt to put online the work me and Sarge Younan had started in documenting the names and achievements of Americans of Lebanese descent. The acronym was carefully chosen to resemble the name of a beautiful Lebanese woman, named Amalid, that I was madly in love with back then. So the website amalid.com was born as a work of love and continues to be even though me and Amalid were not meant to be together.

Sarge, a first generation American from Chicago born to Lebanese immigrants, was a young fellow who had moved West to Newport Beach to try his luck and was ultra-nationalist. His research on the Lebanese expatriates in the USA was enough to impress any Lebanese we met, so I put my web design skills to good use. Myself I had moved to Irvine, California in December of 1999 after I had finished my MS in Chemistry at UNT and taken a semester of computer classes as well as worked as a computer lab support specialist and web designer.

Soon the Prominent Lebanese Americans list was online and I supplemented that work with a desire to portray the beauty of Middle Eastern culture and Arts on the website as well. During these times I was discovering that beauty myself, me being someone who had come to the USA with an identity crisis of sorts. I had left Lebanon with many painful memories of the civil war and an insistence that anything Arabic or Middle Eastern was inferior. How could it not be right? I mean the civil war got so ugly in Lebanon that at one time Christian was killing Christian from the same family!! Let alone the numerous wars between the various Muslim, Druze and Palestinian militias.

The fact is that in Irvine, after attending a concert at UCI by the University of California, Santa Barbra Middle Eastern Ensemble, I was struck by the beauty of Arabic music and the finesse of its lyric. The Nostalgia ignited and I was soon listening to nothing but Fairuz, Marcel Khalifeh and Ziad Rahbani.

AMALID has since grown tremendously. I since those early days picked up a camera and taught myself photography and worked as a professional portrait photographer in Los Angeles. My readings in Middle Eastern poetry and political thought openened my eyes to greats such as Jalaluddin Rumi, Attar, Hallaj, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. My view of Islam changed and I am no longer the polemicist I was but an apologist for Islamic Sufism and all that it symbolizes of unitary and inclusivist vision. The Prominent Lebanese American list grew from personal efforts and numerous emails from the Lebanese diaspora in the US. The list has been supplemented by the Prominent Jewish Americans list, the Arab Hall of Greatness, and last but not least the page on Middle Eastern Women and the Flowers of Allah. It is still my belief that the Women of the middle east will be the definitive catalyst that will bring about the reformation of Islam and put evolutionary pressure on the men of the middle east to better themselves.

At the same time, my understanding and appreciation of American culture grew as well. So it was natural to portray on the website the poetry of the likes of Charles Bukowski from Venice Beach, and the writings of American scholars such as Joseph Cambell. In addition, my hands on experience of Direct Democracy at work during the 2004 Presidential elections in the USA served as a model for me on how an enlightened democratic country ought to be. Needless to mention there was awareness of the ignorance of the Arab-hating ultra-conservative right wing Republicans and Neo-conservative Christians such as Bill O'reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Pat Robertson.

My current work consists of debunking Orientalist racist theories (see AMALID COP), translating the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi into Arabic and proselytising his vision, capturing the beauty of Middle Eastern women on film, fighting political corruption and backward mentalities and urban myths on the ground, promoting peace and mutual understanding in the Middle East, and sowing the seeds of strengthening the bridge between the Lebanese in Lebanon and in the diaspora with the hope of being able to funnel some of the wealth that the Lebanese have accumulated abroad to fund charity, educational, cultural, artistic and social work on the ground in Lebanon.

I hope AMALID has lived up to your hopes of strengthening the sense of national pride in the people of the middle east, promoting the beauty of middle eastern culture, promoting mutual understanding and exchange between East and West.

We look forward to materializing all these exciting projects with the hope of bringing closer to reality the prospect of World Peace.

Thank you all for your hard work, AMALID founders as well as supporters and visitors.

Sincerely,

Rami Elias Cremesti BS, MS

founder AMALID

January 1, 2005

Greater Beirut, Lebnaon

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