From Acre Prison
من سجن عكا
Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin
The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.
من سجن عكا طلعت جنازة
محمد جمجوم وفؤاد حجازي
ويقول محمد أنا أولكم
Watch
Recording: Firqat al-ʿAshiqin — فرقة العاشقين
On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at Acre prison for the events of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron. The record of the sentence is kept in the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedia of the Palestine question. The mourning was national; the poet Ibrahim Tuqan named the day Red Tuesday.
Out of the funerals came this song. Its opening lines — from Acre prison the funeral went out, Muhammad Jamjoum and Fuad Hijazi — carry the names themselves, so that anyone who sings it performs an act of remembering. It is a folk lament in the oldest sense: no single author, passed voice to voice, sharpened by each generation that needed it.
The verse Palestinians quote most is the one this archive has taken as its epigraph. In the song’s telling, the condemned do not wait to be taken — they argue over who will hang first: and Muhammad says, I will be the first of you, Muhammad Jamjoum claiming the first place at the gallows, and Fuad Hijazi answering that the first place was his. The words are the song’s, not a court transcript: the lament was composed after the executions to commemorate the men, and what they actually said on the scaffold was never recorded. That is precisely what the song preserves — not a quotation but a people’s understanding of how its sons met the rope. The scaffold at Acre was meant to end an uprising; the song turned it into a beginning, and that inversion — the execution that galvanised instead of silenced — is why the remembering matters, and why the song has never been allowed to fall silent.
The rendition most Palestinians know belongs to Firqat al-ʿAshiqin, the ensemble founded in Damascus by refugees of 1948, who made the prison songs of Mandate Palestine into anthems of the revolution’s generation. Nearly a century after the gallows at Acre, the song is still sung at prisoners’ solidarity vigils — the three men of 1930 stand at the head of the line the Palestinian prisoners’ movement claims as its own beginning.
Sources
Connected in the archive
9 connected records9 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 8 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Acreعكا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Its opening lines — from Acre prison the funeral went out, Muhammad Jamjoum and Fuad Hijazi — carry the names themselves, so that anyone who sings it performs an act of remembering.
- Atta al-Zirعطا الزير
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at Acre prison for the events of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.
- Fuad Hijaziفؤاد حجازي
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at Acre prison for the events of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.
- Hebronالخليل
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at Acre prison for the events of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.
- Ibrahim Tuqanإبراهيم طوقان
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The mourning was national; the poet Ibrahim Tuqan named the day Red Tuesday.
- Muhammad Jamjoumمحمد جمجوم
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at Acre prison for the events of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.
- and 2 more
names this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Red Tuesday and the Songs of the Prison
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: The lament that went out with the funerals and never stopped being sung. Its opening lines are the names themselves — which is why singing it is an act of remembering.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“From Acre Prison — Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poems/min-sijn-akka.- MLA
“From Acre Prison — Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poems/min-sijn-akka. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-min-sijn-akka, title = {From Acre Prison — Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poems/min-sijn-akka}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }