Birth: 1/1/1897 Death:1/1/1986
Born in Beirut in 1897; daughter of the prominent Sunni politician and deputy in Ottoman parliament Salim Salam; was educated at home by Sheikh Abdullah Bustani, the most famous Arabic lexicographer of his days; began writing on women’s rights and the nationalist struggle at the age of 14 and remained dedicated to these causes for the rest of her life; was the first Arab woman in Greater Syria in 1927 to unveil her face in public during an oration at Sheikh Bustani’s funeral; married Ahmad Samih Al-Khalidi from Jerusalem in 1929; translated and published Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Aeneid from English into Arabic in the 1940s (they remain in print till today); left Palestine for Beirut in 1948; published her best-selling memoir in 1978; died in Beirut 1986.
