Wajdi Mallat was educated at the Jesuit college of Beirut, then studied for an advanced degree in Latin while earning a Masters in law from Saint Joseph University,[1] where his classmates included many of the subsequent intellectual and political leaders of Lebanon. Among his professors was Choucri Cardahi. Wajdi Mallat was attached early on to the unique interwar experiment of liberalism in the Levant, especially Egypt, which he lived first hand from the close friendship between his father and the leader of the Egyptian national movement, Saad Zaghloul.[4] As the young representative of the Lebanese delegation to UNESCO, which held an early Congress in Beirut in 1948, he made friends with such luminaries as Taha Hussein and Louis Massignon on his trip to Paris in preparation of the meeting.[5]