Eltaher.org — The Mohamed Ali Eltaher Archive

Mohamed Ali Eltaher, known by the Arab nickname Aboul-Hassan, was a Palestinian journalist who spent his working life in Cairo and whose newspaper circulated across the Arab world and its diasporas. The website his family built opens with the saying that used to be repeated about him: that the sun never set on two things, the British Empire and the newspaper published by Mohamed Ali Eltaher. The site tells his story and his wife’s, and — more usefully for a researcher — provides the sources and references for the political and historical questions of the countries between Morocco and Iraq, and between Syria and Indonesia, from 1912 to 1974.

The publications section records eight books and a great many articles and interviews published in newspapers and periodicals across the Arab world, in countries of Arab immigration and elsewhere. The books are all out of print. The site asks, reasonably, that anyone quoting from Eltaher’s newspapers, books or articles cite the source. It is honest about the language barrier: everything Eltaher wrote and published was in Arabic, and the site notes that non-Arabic-reading scholars who have quoted him previously presumably used translators — a complication it expects will continue.

The documents and photographs section is the archive’s other half, and its introduction is the most instructive paragraph on the site. Photographs, correspondence and documents are classified by country, each shown under its current flag, with the historical flag of Eltaher’s own period displayed alongside where it differs. And then the loss is recorded: many items “have either disappeared, were stolen, or were simply lost over the years as a result of the multiple moves from one country to another since Eltaher left Egypt in 1955,” with the main loss occurring in Lebanon during the civil war, when one crate of a shipment of three or four crates vanished. That sentence is the condition of Palestinian archives generally, stated by a family that lived it.

The archive is also a rare thing structurally: a private, individual, family-published archive with no institutional custodian, presented as a research resource rather than a memorial. The site’s editorial team frames it explicitly for the interested reader, student, historian, academic, journalist or diplomat. It is a reminder that a significant part of the Palestinian documentary record survives only because particular families decided to keep and then publish it.

Sources

• Eltaher.org — home and statement of purpose
• Publications — newspapers, books and articles, Eltaher.org
• Documents, Correspondence and Photos — Eltaher.org