Birth: NULL/NULL/1905 Death:NULL/NULL/1979
Born in Jerusalem on 15 May 1905 to a father of Turkish origin and a Palestinian mother from Jerusalem; was educated in local schools, incl. Al-Salahiya, Ar-Rashidiya, Al-Ma’mouniya and the Sultan Office; accompanied his father to Hijaz and then Syria, Egypt, and back to Jerusalem; worked in the postal service of the British authorities until 1924; was exposed to Communist thinking and ideas brought by Russian Jewish thinkers and joined the Communist Movement in Palestine (until 1939); went to study Political Economy in Moscow in 1925 and became good friends with Turkish poet Nazim Hikmat, who gave him the political nickname ‘Mustafa Sa’do’; returned to Palestine in 1929 and got involved in the process of Arabizing the Communist Party in Palestine; was imprisoned by British forces for his political work in 1931 and forced into house arrest in Jerusalem; fled to Haifa, then Lebanon (in 1933) and France, where he published Ash-Sharq ‘Al-Arabi newspaper until it was shut down in summer 1936; moved to Moscow; was sent by the Communist Party to Spain during the 1936 civil war to convince Franco’s Moroccan troops not to fight with the fascist regime; after that was sent to Algeria, Paris, Damascus, and Beirut, where he held many important ranks in the Communist Party; left the party in 1939 after the party welcomed the Aug. 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin, while he opposed Nazism and Fascism and disagreed with party members in Lebanon; moved back to Jerusalem and worked as writer, translator, radio broadcaster; among the international literature he translated into Arabic was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat; died in 1979; in 2001, the IPS published the Memoirs of Najati Sidqi (by Hanna Abu Hanna).
