Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
The Palestinian poet is one of two types: a poet by nationality, and a poet who carries the contents of the issue in his poetry, even if he is not Palestinian. Our poet in this episode is a Palestinian poet whose passport classified him as having Jordanian nationality, so some dictionaries followed him with this classification. Especially since our poet was a cultural activist and academic lecturer in the Kingdom, which made some people believe that he was only Jordanian.
But the first fact is that our poet, born in 1929, was born in Qalunya, near Jerusalem, and grew up there. The second truth is that the contents of his poetry and his many activities tell of his love and affection for his country, Palestine. It was always his first love and his bleeding wound. For its sake, he loved everyone who resisted to liberate it, and sang of their heroism and cried for their martyrs, including his son Muhammad, who left his studies at the University of Aleppo and joined the ranks of the resistance. To repel the Zionist invasion of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, in 1982, he died a martyr in the Battle of Bhamdoun. His deep sympathy did not stop at the borders of his homeland, but rather extended to liberation movements all over the world.
He is an academic poet, one of the first veteran poets who paved the way for the Third Renaissance. He wrote modern poetry before the emergence of this movement. Mujtahid did not stop studying until he obtained his doctorate at the age of 43. A number of critics and writers wrote about him in their books, the most prominent of whom are: Nasser al-Din al-Assad, Kamel al-Sawafiri, Abd al-Rahman al-Kayyali, Jamil Saeed, Muhammad Shehadeh Alyan, and Wassef Abu al-Shabab. Dozens of newspaper articles were published about his poetry and poetry evenings in Al-Anbaa, Al-Seyassah, Al-Qabas, Public Opinion, Al-Watan, and Mirror of the Nation (Kuwaiti).
Who is our poet?
Raja Muhammad Abdullah Ahmed Samreen was born on March 7, 1929 in Qalunya, near Jerusalem, and completed his primary education there. He received his secondary education at the Rawdat al-Ma’arif National College in Jerusalem, and obtained the Egyptian Tawjihi certificate in 1950, then studied the Arabic language and literature. At Al-Azhar University, from which he obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1955, a postgraduate diploma in 1965, a master’s degree in 1967, and a doctorate in 1972. He
worked in high schools in Jordan, then moved to the Gulf and taught in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait between the years 1955 - 1969, then in Kuwait. Then he was an artistic director between the years 1970 - 1980, then a teacher at the Institute of Teacher Education from 1980 - 1986, and he supervised cultural activities at the College of Technological Studies from 1987 until his retirement in 1989. He did not stop teaching after his retirement, so he taught the Arabic language at the National College in Amman until the year 1994.
Raja Samrin was a member of the Jordanian Writers Association, the Modern Literature Association, and the Arab Poets Symposium in Cairo. He was a member of the Palestinian Writers and Journalists Union, Kuwait Branch, from 1974 to 1990.
Samreen died on March 11, 2018 in Jordan and was buried there.
His writings:
Samrin spent five decades in literature and poetry, during which he enriched the Arab library with meaningful types of knowledge, including valuable literary, scientific, intellectual, and educational works, in addition to the diversity in his intellectual movement. He published the following books: “The Ages of Arabic Literature, in the History of Literature”, 1958. “Palestinian Poetry in the Battle of Beirut”, 1983. “Poetry of Contemporary Arab Women 1945-1970”, doctoral thesis, 1990. “Under the Microscope”, Critical Studies, 2003. “The Humanist Tendency in Contemporary Arabic Poetry,” Critical Studies, 2003. “Diaspora Papers,” an autobiography, 2004.
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