Naseeb Azeez Shaheen was born on June 21, 1931, in Chicago, IL to Azeez and Saleemeh (Balluteen) Shaheen. Shaheen had three brothers: Shaheen Azeez Shaheen, Shouky A. Shaheen, and Tawfeek Shaheen. Shaheen spent three years of his childhood in Ramallah, Palestine, from 1935-1938, before his family moved back to the United States. He returned to the Middle East to study English Literature at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962. Shaheen earned both of his graduate degrees from UCLA, receiving his Master of Arts in 1965 and his Ph.D. in English Literature in 1969. He taught English Literature for forty years at the University of Memphis, teaching Shakespeare, English Renaissance Literature, and The Bible as Literature. Shaheen was also a philanthropist who endowed several U.S. scholarships and paid for three buildings' construction at Birzeit University in Ramallah. Shaheen died from complications after heart surgery on September 26, 2009.

Shaheen's research interests in both biblical references in William Shakespeare's plays and Ramallah's history took him through England on the way to Palestine almost every summer beginning in 1972. He visited London, Oxford, Stratford and Cambridge and searched for 16th- and 17th-century editions of Bibles and other religious texts from antique and rare book shops and fairs. His collection of pre-King James English Bibles guaranteed that he would work from the very same Bibles Shakespeare would have used during his career. Shaheen published four books on biblical references in Shakespeare's plays. Three of his books focus on biblical references in Shakespeare's tragedies (1987), histories (1989) and comedies (1993). One book analyzes a selection of Shakespeare's plays in one volume, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays (1999). Shaheen also published more than forty-five articles in periodicals such as Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, Bible Editions & Versions, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in Bibliography, English Language Notes, and others. He also wrote a book on biblical references in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which he published in 1976. Shaheen compiled three books on Ramallah, including Ramallah: Its History and Its Genealogies, which he co-authored with his father and published in 1982; A Pictorial History of Ramallah (1992); and A Pictorial History of Ramallah, Part II (2005).

The University of Tennessee Libraries Special Collections holds a portion of Shaheen's antiquarian Bibles used during his research, having received 307 volumes of rare Bibles, literary references, prayer books, Psalters and homilies.