The Touqan family

The Touqans were to Nablus what the Husaynis were to Jerusalem: the family that ran the place. Beshara Doumani’s study of Jabal Nablus counts the Tuqans among the handful of high-ranking political families — alongside the Nimrs, Jarrars and Jayyusis — whose names remained stable over the centuries, and the family governed Nablus for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their rule punctuated by the running feuds of the Qays-Yaman era, above all against the Abd al-Hadi family of Arraba. Their power was of the old kind: land, tax farms and fortified town houses, one of which, built after the Ottoman reconquest, still stands in the Old City.

The twentieth-century Touqans converted that standing into letters. Abd al-Fattah Touqan’s children made the family name mean something new in Arabic culture. Ibrahim (1905–1941), schooled in Nablus, Jerusalem and Beirut, wrote the rousing nationalist verse of the 1936 revolt — he is remembered simply as the “Poet of Palestine” — and died young, at thirty-six. His sister Fadwa (1917–2003), pulled out of school as a girl and educated by Ibrahim in defiance of the household’s conservatism, outlived him by six decades to become the “Poetess of Palestine,” her autobiography A Mountainous Journey as unsparing about Nabulsi patriarchy as about occupation. Their eldest brother Ahmad (1903–1981) took the administrative road and ended up briefly prime minister of Jordan in the Black September of 1970.

A cousin completed the family’s turn to the life of the mind. Qadri Touqan (1910–1971) — son of Hafiz Touqan, nephew of Abd al-Fattah — was a mathematician and historian of Arab science, principal of al-Najah School in Nablus, and later Jordan’s foreign minister in 1964–65. Imprisoned by the British in 1936, he came to believe that the Nakba could only be answered with science: “fire can only be fought with fire,” he wrote in After the Nakba; “science can only be countered by science.” He was buried in Nablus beside his cousin Ibrahim — the governor’s house now a family of poets and professors.

Notable members

• Ibrahim Touqan (1905–1941) — nationalist poet of the Mandate era, known as the “Poet of Palestine”; Fadwa’s brother and teacher.
• Fadwa Touqan (1917–2003) — the “Poetess of Palestine,” author of eight collections and the autobiography A Mountainous Journey.
• Ahmad Touqan (1903–1981) — their eldest brother; educator and Jordanian statesman, prime minister of Jordan in September–October 1970.
• Qadri Touqan (1910–1971) — their cousin; mathematician and historian of Arab science, principal of al-Najah School and Jordanian foreign minister (1964–65).

Sources

• Fadwa Tuqan — PalQuest biography
• Ibrahim Tuqan — PalQuest biography
• Qadri Tuqan — PalQuest biography
• Ibrahim Touqan — All 4 Palestine profile
• Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 — UC Press E-Books