Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (28 August 1919 – 12 December 1994) () was an
Iraqi-
Palestinian author, artist and intellectual born in
Adana in
French-occupied Cilicia to a
Syriac Orthodox Christian family. His family survived the
Seyfo Genocide and fled to the
British Mandate of Palestine in the early 1920s. Jabra was educated at government schools under the British-mandatory educational system in
Bethlehem and
Jerusalem, such as the
Government Arab College, and won a scholarship from the
British Council to study at the
University of Cambridge. Following the
events of 1948, Jabra fled Jerusalem and settled in
Baghdad, where he found work teaching at the
University of Baghdad. In 1952 he was awarded a
Rockefeller Foundation Humanities fellowship to study English literature at
Harvard University. Over the course of his literary career, Jabra wrote novels, short stories, poetry, criticism, and a screenplay. He was a prolific translator of modern English and French literature into Arabic. Jabra was also an enthusiastic painter, and he pioneered the
Hurufiyya movement, which sought to integrate traditional Islamic art within contemporary art through the decorative use of Arabic script.
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