Birth: NULL/NULL/1929 Death:1/5/2019
Born in Jerusalem on 25 February 1929 to a Christian family; attended the Friends Boys’ School, graduating in 1947; joined the Law School in Jerusalem, but it closed down in 1948; became a teacher of Arabic Language and Literature at the Frères Boys School (1952) and the St. George’s School in Jerusalem (Al-Mutran) until 1968; continued his studies and received a PhD in Arabic Literature from the University of London in 1969; immigrated to the US, starting out as a professor at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut; then went to Canada in 1975, where he became Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies at McGill University; his works as writer and translator of poetry, fiction, and memoirs include a translation of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood as well as Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1980), the editing of Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Quran (Routledge/Curzon, 2002), and the novel Returning to Jerusalem (in Arabic); he was a two-time winner of the University of Arkansas Press Award for Translation from Arabic (1995 and 1997) and was also awarded the 2004 Mentoring Award by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) of North America in recognition of his work in Middle East Studies; after his retirement from McGill in 2004, he published a collection of his own short stories, A Retired Gentleman (2007), and a memoir of his youth, The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem (2014), as well as translated Three Treatises on the I’jaz of the Qur’an (2015); passed away on May 1, 2019, at the age of 90.
