Abu-Husayn was born in 1951 in the Palestinian village of Nuba in the Hebron area, then immigrated to Jordan with his family.[3] He ranked in the top 10 in the Tawjihi exams, scoring a 902 out of a possible 1000, which earned him a scholarship at AUB through USAID.[1][3] In 1971, he began his undergraduate degree in English and planned to return to Jordan to continue teaching.[1] Abu-Husayn had come from poverty and hardships, which made him determined to excel in his studies.[3] When he completed his undergraduate studies in 1975, at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, he instead remained at AUB and continued his master's degree in anthropology, followed by the PhD program which he completed in 1982.[1][4]
Abu-Husayn was mentored by the AUB's Kamal Salibi, a noted historian of Lebanon. Through the use of Ottoman imperial archives and other original sources from the Ottoman period, Abu-Husayn expanded on Salibi's work in this field, and successfully challenged many of the myths of Lebanese history during the Ottoman era.[1]
