Khalil Sakakini

Khalil Sakakini (23 January 1878 – 13 August 1953) was a Palestinian teacher, scholar, poet and Arab nationalist from Jerusalem. He founded the Dusturiyyah school in 1909 and pioneered a progressive system of education — no grades, prizes or punishments, and Arabic rather than Turkish as the language of instruction — and he led a campaign to reform the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, for which the church excommunicated him. In 1948 he fled Jerusalem for Cairo, where he died. ^{1 2}

He was schooled in Jerusalem at the Greek Orthodox school, at the Anglican Christian Mission Society College, and at the Zion English College, where he read literature. He travelled to Britain and then to the United States to join his brother Yusif in Philadelphia; during nine months in America he wrote for Arabic literary magazines, translated for Professor Richard Gottheil at Columbia University, taught Arabic, and worked in a factory in Maine and as a street vendor. Returning in 1908, he worked as a journalist for the Jerusalem magazine Al-Asma'i, taught Arabic at the Salahiyya school, and tutored at the American Colony. ¹

In 1909 he founded the Dusturiyyah, or National, School, the first school in the region to ban corporal punishment, and introduced new methods of teaching Arabic. His pupil Wasif Jawhariyyeh praised a style that taught through anecdotes rather than memorised rules and "instilled in them patriotism and manliness". In 1919 Sakakini joined the Educational Authority of Palestine and headed the Jerusalem Teachers' College; he then served twelve years as Inspector for Education before resigning in protest at the appointment of Herbert Samuel, a Jew, as High Commissioner. He founded the Wataniyya school in 1925 and the Nahda College in Jerusalem in 1938. ¹

Sakakini led a movement to give his church a more Arab character, judging the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem corrupt; his 1913 pamphlet "The Orthodox Renaissance in Palestine" led to his excommunication. On the last day of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem in 1917 he was arrested for sheltering the Polish-American Jew Alter Levine, and both men were imprisoned in Damascus; on his release he joined the Arab Revolt and composed its anthem. His wife Sultana died in October 1939 and was buried in the Greek Orthodox cemetery on Mount Zion; he wrote poems eulogising her. ¹

During the 1948 war the Sakakinis were among the last families to leave the Katamon neighbourhood, fleeing to Cairo a few days before the city was divided; there Taha Hussein nominated him to the Arabic Language Academy. His son Sari's sudden death in 1953, at thirty-nine, devastated him, and he died three months later, on 13 August 1953. His daughters Dumya and Hala later lived in Ramallah; Hala edited his journals, published in 1955, and wrote two memoirs of her own. The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah now edits and publishes his diaries, which he kept from 1907 to 1952. ^{1 3}

The Arabic article names him personally in its lead: a Palestinian educator from Jerusalem, "a Christian and an Arab nationalist". The English article says he was born into a Palestinian Christian Orthodox family — family framing — and records his own acts within that church: he campaigned to reform the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, published the pamphlet "The Orthodox Renaissance in Palestine" in 1913, founded the Orthodox Brotherhood society, and was excommunicated by the church — a penalty directed at a member personally. Because two independent texts thus attest him personally, his faith is recorded in his data record as christian, following the settlement reached for Yacoub Artin; the church the two texts place him in is the Orthodox church of Jerusalem, and no branch value is separately recorded. ^{1 2 3}