The Barghouti family

Deir Ghassana forms part of the Bani Zeid string of villages northwest of Ramallah, and the Barghoutis were its first family: local heritage accounts describe one of the oldest and most powerful clans of the Bani Zeid sheikdom, nine branches whose leaders were known simply as the Baraghithah, their power reaching beyond the hills toward the coastal plain. Their one-floor palace, built in 1602, still stands in the center of the village. “The cluster of villages was dominated by the Barghouti clan,” the Guardian wrote of the poet Mourid Barghouti’s home country, “of politicians, poets and landowners.”

Two of the clan’s twentieth-century sons have PalQuest biographies. Omar al-Saleh al-Barghouti (1894–1965), born in Deir Ghassana, was a lawyer and nationalist leader, co-author with Khalil Totah of The History of Palestine (1923) and later a Jordanian senator and briefly minister of education. Bashir Barghouti (1931–2000), born in the same village, took the other fork of the century’s politics: a communist leader and journalist — editor of al-Fajr and al-Tali’a — he became the first secretary-general of the Palestinian People’s Party and, in 1996, a PA minister of industry; he was buried in Deir Ghassana, where a secondary school carries his name.

The name means something else again because of Mourid Barghouti (1944–2021). Born in Deir Ghassana on July 8, 1944, he was studying English literature in Cairo when the June 1967 war barred his return; deported from Egypt in 1977, he spent long years of exile in Budapest as a PLO representative and first saw Ramallah again only in 1996. The memoir of that return, I Saw Ramallah (1997), won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and, in Ahdaf Soueif’s English translation with a foreword by Edward Said, made him the most widely read Palestinian prose writer of his generation; its sequel, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, chronicled a later visit with his son. He published twelve poetry collections and died in Amman on February 14, 2021. His wife was the Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (1946–2014), who translated his poetry into English; their son, Tamim al-Barghouti (b. 1977, Cairo), is a poet and political scientist — three writers from one house of the Baraghithah.

Notable members

• Mourid Barghouti (1944–2021) — poet and memoirist, author of I Saw Ramallah, winner of the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
• Omar al-Saleh al-Barghouti (1894–1965) — lawyer, historian and nationalist leader; co-author of The History of Palestine (1923).
• Bashir Barghouti (1931–2000) — communist leader and first secretary-general of the Palestinian People’s Party; PA minister of industry (1996).
• Tamim al-Barghouti (b. 1977) — Mourid’s son; poet and political scientist.

Sources

• Obituary: Mourid Barghouti, a story of diaspora and a dispossessed country — Ahram Online
• A life in writing: Mourid Barghouti — The Guardian
• Omar al-Saleh al-Barghouti — PalQuest biography
• Bashir Barghouti — PalQuest biography
• Mourid Barghouti (1944–2021) — Banipal