Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud
عبد الرحيم محمود
1913–1948
Anabta, Tulkarm district
The 'martyr poet' — a schoolteacher who wrote of carrying his soul in his palm and was killed in battle at al-Shajara in July 1948.
Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud was born in 1913 in Anabta, in the Tulkarm district. He studied at the National Najah School in Nablus, where Ibrahim Tuqan taught, and afterwards taught Arabic at the same school — a line of descent that runs through most of the political poetry of Mandate Palestine.
In 1937, during the Arab revolt, he joined the ranks of the fighters. British pursuit forced him out of the country: first to Damascus, then to Baghdad, where he entered the Iraqi Military Academy in 1939–40 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. It is an unusual biography for a poet — the training was not metaphorical, and he returned to use it.
He was killed on 13 July 1948 in an attack on the colony of al-Sajara, next to the Arab village of al-Shajara in the Galilee, and became known as the martyr poet. His most famous poem, “The Martyr,” had described exactly that end years before it happened. The novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra called him the first knight-poet of modern Arabic poetry, the one who followed his words with action. Because he died in 1948, his work has long since passed into the public domain in most jurisdictions, and it circulates freely in Arabic.
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