Ibrahim Tuqan

Ibrahim Tuqan was born in Nablus in 1905 into the prominent Tuqan family, which had governed the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was educated at al-Rashadiyya al-Gharbiyya in Nablus and St George’s School in Jerusalem, and took a degree in literature at the American University of Beirut, where he studied from 1923 to 1929. He taught Arabic literature at An-Najah National School in Nablus and later at AUB, and served as sub-director of the Arabic programme section of the Palestine Broadcasting Service — the Mandate radio station, and the first mass medium Palestinian poetry ever had.

He is the elder brother of Fadwa Tuqan, and her first teacher: he tutored her at home at a time when her formal schooling had been cut short, and her career as the leading Palestinian woman poet of the century begins in that arrangement.

Tuqan’s own poetry belongs to the years of British rule and Zionist land purchase, and much of it is political and satirical — attacks on land brokers, on factionalism among Palestinian leaders, and on the Mandate itself. His best-known work, “Mawtini,” was written in 1934, set to music by Mohammed Flayfel, and became the de facto Palestinian anthem until an official one was adopted in 1996; in 2004 it was adopted as the national anthem of Iraq. He married Samia Abd al-Hadi in 1937 and had two children. He died in Jerusalem on 2 May 1941, aged thirty-five, of a peptic ulcer — seven years before the catastrophe his poetry had spent a decade warning about.

Sources

• Ibrahim Tuqan — Wikipedia
• Mawtini — Wikipedia