On November 10th, 2024 Elza lost her valiant battle with frontotemporal dementia, a disease that robbed her of her beauty and presence. Below is her bio and her life’s accomplishments.

There was a deeply spiritual side to Elza that very few people knew. She expressed it best in her poetry.

The Maalouf family in Lebanon is known for producing many poets during the Arab renaissance and Elza was no exception. Before gaining prominence through her work with Don Beck and Ken Wilber, she walked with the mystics and the Sufis. At the bottom of this page is an audio to 7 of her poems from a 2002 CD she recorded called “You Are the One: Thoughts & Music for World Soul.”

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Elza is a Lebanese-American author, political theorist, and consultant focusing her work on business, cultural and political development of the Arab world.

She is a graduate of Lebanese University Law School and  author of the ground-breaking book: Emerge! The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of the Middle East. (October 2014, SelectBooks, Inc.,  New York, NY). The book won two national awards in 2015; the Bronze Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and the first runner up for the Eric Hoffer Award for debut authors. 

Ms. Maalouf was named by EnlightenNext Magazine one of today’s brightest minds for her expertise on the memetics of the Middle East. She’s a member of the Evolutionary Leaders, an organization made up of the brightest global minds in the fields of science, spirituality, and consciousness studies.  The group’s primary purpose is to advance the conscious evolution of humanity.

Ms. Maalouf is the founder of the Integral Insights Consulting (IIC) Group, and advisory which brings human potential research to bear on organizational challenges and opportunities. The IIC Group is dedicated to the multifaceted development of individuals, teams and organizations.

Ms. Maalouf also  co-founded the Center for Human Emergence Mideast, a think-tank that emphasizes the scientific understanding of cultures through the prism of the “bio-psycho-social systems”, a framework pioneered by Dr. Clare W. Graves  and applied in global hotspots by his successor Dr. Don E. Beck. Through her close work with Dr. Beck, Ms. Maalouf has pioneered the Integral movement and the application of Spiral Dynamics integral in the Middle East. Together, they evolved Muzafer Sherif’s realistic conflict theory by adding to it Beck’s value systems ^VMEMEs and Maalouf’s Indigenous Intelligence and reformulated many social conflict models such as  the ^VACE Model and the Anatomy of a Conflict Model which are detailed in her book.

Ms. Maalouf is currently working on her  Arab Memome Project (AMP), which is a country-by-country examination of the memetic patterns of emergence that offers a unique value-systems based perspective on the conflict in the Muslim World. The AMP offers detailed mapping of economic and political strategies designed to provide each country with a long-term road-map for development in light of the most profound changes the region is currently going through.

Ms. Maalouf is an avid writer and blogger. Her work has appeared in academic journals like the Hague-based Spanda Journal. She’s a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post,  Kosmos Journal, and The Integral Leadership Review.