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الفهرس

A room of the archive

The Voice

الصوت

Taha Muhammad Ali

طه محمد علي

1931–2011

Saffuriyya, Galilee

Self-taught poet of the destroyed village of Saffuriyya, who sold souvenirs to pilgrims in Nazareth by day and read poetry at night, and wrote in a plain voice unlike anyone else's.

GalileeSaffuriyyaNazarethPalestinians in Israelself-taught

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in Saffuriyya, a village in the Galilee north of Nazareth. His formal schooling ended after the fourth grade. He was seventeen in 1948 when the village’s people fled to Lebanon; Saffuriyya was destroyed, and he was never able to return to it. He came back across the border and settled in Nazareth, where he lived for the rest of his life, a few miles from a village he could not enter.

He kept a small souvenir shop near the Church of the Annunciation, selling to Christian pilgrims by day and reading poetry at night. He was, in the most literal sense, self-taught — he worked through classical Arabic literature and modern poetry on his own — and the voice that came out of it was unlike the rhetorical, declamatory register that dominated Palestinian poetry in his lifetime: short lines, uneven beats, imagery from village life, and a dry comic intelligence that arrives at grief sideways.

His major English collection, So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005, was translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin and published by Copper Canyon Press in 2006, and made him internationally known in his seventies. Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century tells his life alongside the century’s. He died in Nazareth on 2 October 2011.

Selected works

  • So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (trans. Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin; Copper Canyon Press, 2006)

Sources

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  1. RevengePoem
  2. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud1913–1948
  3. Dareen Tatour1982–

Connected in the archive

12 connected records

12 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

born in — 1 record

written by them — 1 record

  • RevengePoems

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "taha-muhammad-ali" → Taha Muhammad Ali

named in this record — 1 record

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

names this person — 1 record

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • Ameen Muhammad Ali (Abu Arab)Testimonies

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: He was thirteen when Saffuriyya, two kilometres away, was bombed from the air during Ramadan in July 1948. His family — including his brothers, one of them the poet Taha Muhammad Ali, and a twelve-year-old sister — hid in the undergrowth and were driven north toward Lebanon the next morning.

on a related subject — 8 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.

Chicago
“Taha Muhammad Ali.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/taha-muhammad-ali.
MLA
“Taha Muhammad Ali.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/taha-muhammad-ali. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-taha-muhammad-ali, title = {Taha Muhammad Ali}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/taha-muhammad-ali}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }