Ihsan Abbas

Born on 2 December 1920 in Ayn Ghazal, some twenty-five kilometres south of Haifa, to a sheep merchant of limited means, he studied at the Arab College in Jerusalem and taught at the Safad school until 1946. He was studying Arabic literature in Cairo when Zionist forces occupied his village in the autumn of 1948, and his family found refuge in Baghdad. After ten years teaching in Khartoum, he spent a quarter of a century as a professor at the American University of Beirut, until 1986. He died in Amman on 29 July 2003.

An introductory profile. The source material below provides the fuller record.