Sadik al-Azm was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1934, and educated at the American University of Beirut (B.A. in Philosophy in 1957). He continued graduate studies in Modern European Philosophy at Yale University, from where he also received his Ph.D. (1961). He taught philosophy at Yale, Hunter College in New York City, the American University of Beirut, and University of Damascus, where he held a Chair for the History of Modern and European Philosophy from 1977-1999. He has been Visiting Professor of Contemporary Arab Social and Political Thought at various universities around the world: Princeton, Hamburg, Humboldt University Berlin, Leipzig, Antwerp, Central European University at Budapest, Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. He was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; the Netherlands Intitute of Advanced Studies; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Bonn University; the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University; Princeton University; and Washington DC. He holds a Doctor Honoris Causa from Hamburg University, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Dutch Foundation Praemium Erasmianum, the Leopold-Lucas-Prize by Tubingen University, as well as the Goethe Medal by the Federal Republic of Germany. He has published, both in Arabic and English, on modern European philosophy and intervened, through books, articles and pamphlets, in the major social, political, religious and ideological debates raging in the Middle East since the early sixties to the present. He is considered to be one of the most important advocates of the laic movement in the Arab World. He didn’t hesitate to defy censorship since his first publications on the Arabic 1967 defeat and the religious critic. His works are also about Islamism and the „Salman Rushdie case". A Human Rights and Civil Society activist, he is President of the League of Free Syrian writers and editor-in-chief of its journal Awraq.