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Salah Wahab – an international vision from the land of Pharaohs

What an honour to be asked to write a portrait about Salah Wahab, an icon of the Egyptian tourism for over four decades and one of the tourism writing pioneers all over the world. Although his unique personality had an extensive influence on all Egyptian tourism academics and practitioners between 1970s till his death in 2009, the academic legacy he left is still consulted by many of the tourism scholars worldwide. Wahab was rewarded by international as well as the Egyptian tourism official and non-profit bodies and was honoured internationally in several occasions. I was quite fortunate to see Salah Wahab for the first time when I joined the Faculty of Tourism and Hotel Management in 1985. At that time, he had returned back to Egypt after a long journey in the West working for the United Nations offices in Europe. Wahab not only laid down the foundation of the tourism studies and research at its widest scope in the Middle East which enabled my generation to capture the principles of tourism development and marketing at the bachelor degree level but also inspired many to pursue their post-graduate research in one of the emerging tourism issues. Salah Wahab’s lectures were quite distinctive not only because of his knowledgeable character but also more importantly for his ability to exemplify theory and bring practice into the classroom. His long expertise and involvement in many projects that took place in different regions all over the world in the three decades between 1970s and 1990s had empowered his lecturing and teaching ability with the analytical, comparative, and modelling skills, which are highly required in the tourism academic domain. However, the key determinant of the distinctions of his classes and speeches was the wide ample of knowledge on tourism management planning and development especially at the national and state levels. He was perceiving tourism as a multi-disciplinary field that has full integration with many other disciplines such as economics, sociology, environmental management, and marketing. In his classes and discussions, he never handled any tourism issue in separation of the different forces and influence whether political, geographical, economic, or cultural. On the other hand, he was not giving his support to any fashionable tourism trend or to one of the emerging management practices unless evaluating its forecasted multi-faceted impacts. What you really admire in Wahab’s personality is his obsession of the “tourism science”, as he was addressing in Arabic. Tourism researching and writing to Wahab was not just a profession to gain merits or a career for living, but it was also his daily lifecycle