Tawfiq Canaan

Tawfiq Canaan was born in Beit Jala on 24 September 1882, the son of the first Arab Lutheran pastor in Palestine. After the Schneller School in Jerusalem he studied medicine at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut — later the American University of Beirut — graduating with honours in 1905. He built a distinguished medical career in Jerusalem: municipal doctor, Ottoman medical officer in the First World War, director of the city’s leprosy hospital from 1919 until the end of the Mandate, founder and first president of the Palestine Arab Medical Association in 1944, and first director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital from 1950 until his death.

Alongside medicine, Canaan built a second career recording a folk world he saw disappearing. Beginning with the amulets his patients carried, he documented popular medicine, demonology, saints’ shrines, and seasonal customs, assembling a collection of more than 1,400 amulets and talismans — now the Tawfiq Canaan Collection at Birzeit University. His Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927) remains a standard reference. Politically outspoken, he was arrested by the British in 1939; in 1948 he lost his Musrara home, his clinic, his library, and several unpublished manuscripts. He died in Jerusalem on 15 January 1964 and was buried in Bethlehem.

Selected works

• Aberglaube und Volksmedizin im Lande der Bibel (Superstition and Popular Medicine in the Land of the Bible) (1914)
• Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927)
• Dämonenglaube im Lande der Bibel (Demon Belief in the Land of the Bible) (1929)

Sources

• Tawfiq Canaan — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Tawfiq Canaan — Jerusalem Story