aka Ramadan Abdullah, Ramadan Abdullah al-Shallah

Dr. Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, a former part-time professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, made national headlines in 1995 when he left his job in the United States to lead the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). (The PIJ was founded in Egypt in the late 1970s by Palestinian students, but is now based in Syria.)

Born in 1955 in the Gaza Strip, which was then under Egyptian administration, Shallah taught economics at the University of Gaza in the mid-1980s. He received a doctoral degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies from England's University of Durham in 1990, and wrote many articles on the economics of Middle Eastern countries.

Shallah arrived in Tampa, Florida, in 1991 and spent four years teaching political science at the [Page 332]University of South Florida. At the university, he was ...