Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Isaac Musa Saleh al-Husseini was born in the al-Sa’diyya neighborhood in the occupied city of Jerusalem in 1904. He is married and has two sons and a daughter. He completed his primary education in Jerusalem at the Rassiya, Rashidiya, Sultan Salim, Salahiya College, and Frères schools. He then attended secondary school at the Youth College (also known as the English College) in Jerusalem, graduating in 1922. He earned a diploma in journalism from the American University of Beirut in 1926, a bachelor's degree from the Faculty of Arts at the Egyptian University in 1929, a diploma in Semitic languages from the University of London, and a doctorate in literature from the School of Oriental Studies at the same university in 1934. He worked as a teacher at the Rashidiya School in Jerusalem, then at the Arab College in Jerusalem between 1934 and 1946. He served as an Arabic language inspector in government schools until 1948, then as a lecturer at the American University of Beirut between 1949 and 1957, and at the American University in Cairo between 1957 and 1963. He also lectured at the Institute of Higher Arab Studies of the League of Arab States, where he headed the research department. He was Palestinian and also worked as a lecturer at McGill University in Canada until 1969, and became president of the Hind Al-Husseini College of Arts for Girls.
He was active in the cultural field; he participated in the establishment of the Arab Culture Committee in Palestine in 1945, and served as its Secretary-General. The committee held the first Palestinian Arab Book Fair at the Arab Orthodox Union Club in Jerusalem in 1946. He became a member of the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo in 1961, a member of the Islamic Research Academy of Al-Azhar University in 1963, a member of the Iraqi Scientific Forum in 1971, a member of the Aal al-Bayt Foundation for Islamic Civilization Research in Amman, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the College of Science and Technology in Abu Dis in 1982. He established a center for Islamic research in the house of his teacher, Muhammad Isaf al-Nashashibi, in Jerusalem.
He wrote a number of studies, research papers, and books. Among his published works are: An Opinion on Teaching Arabic (1937), Orientalist Scholars in England (1940), Memoirs of a Hen (1943), The Return of the Ship (1945), The Children’s Anecdotes Series (joint, 1947), and Are Writers Human? (1950), The Muslim Brotherhood: The Largest Modern Islamic Movement (1952), Islam in the Eyes of the West by Philip Hitti (translated from English, 1953), The Crisis of Contemporary Arab Thought (1954), An Introduction to Contemporary Arabic Literature (1963), Arabized Words (1964), Literature and Arab Nationalism (1965), Studies in the Past and Present of Muslims (1966), Contemporary Literary Criticism in the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century (1967), The Names of Jerusalem (1968), The Arab Identity of Jerusalem (1969), Jerusalem in Islam (1969), The Names of Palestine (1971), Orientalism: Its Origins, Development, and Objectives (1976), Contemporary Arab Issues (1978), The Arab Writer Muhammad Is’af al-Nashashibi (1987), and Khalil al-Sakakini: The Modernist Writer (1989).
The Palestine Liberation Organization awarded him the Shield of the Revolution in a ceremony held in Beirut in 1982, and he received the Order of Sciences and Arts, First Class, from Egypt in 1983.
He died in Jerusalem on December 17, 1990.
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