Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
He was not only a poet whose mission was to mobilize the masses, but he was a poet with a stance. He was not only a journalist, relying on analysis and transmission of information, but rather he was a source and storehouse of information. He was not a political activist for the sake of position or prestige, but rather he was an actor who paid the price for his struggle. He is the veteran poet, the virtuous educator, the struggling politician, the persecuted, the detained, the exiled, and the minister, Muhammad Ali Saleh Al-Tayeh.
Who is our poet?
Muhammad Ali Saleh Al-Tayeh “Abu Ikrimah” was born in 1907 in the city of Tulkarm and grew up there. He completed his primary studies in the Al-Fadhiliyya School in the city, and in the secondary stage he joined the Islamic College in Jerusalem, from which he graduated in 1927..
Among the professors of the boy, Muhammad Ali Saleh Al-Tayeh, were senior teachers at the Islamic College in Jerusalem, such as Darwish Al-Miqdadi, Ajaj Nuwaihid, and others. In this cultural and political atmosphere, his political vision blossomed and grew and became stronger.
He was active in the Islamic College, and during his studies there he founded the “Palestinian Student Assembly” in 1925, which was the first nucleus of the Palestinian Student Union, and he was elected its president..
After his graduation, he moved to Ajloun in eastern Jordan, where he worked as a teacher there, and from there he turned to journalistic work. He worked in the “Sada Al-Arab” newspaper and became its editor-in-chief. But he was suspended from work and deported to Palestine because of his bold and critical articles, especially those related to the British-Jordanian treaty..
Al-Tayeh moved to the city of Haifa, shortly before the signs of resistance there, and worked as an editor in the “Islamic University” newspaper. He used to write on the front page a series of articles entitled “A Talk to the Youth,” which he used as a platform to call on the youth to unite and resist the British occupation and the Zionist gangs. These are the articles that were later collected under the same title.
He was also a teacher in the Islamic school that was run by Sheikh Kamel Al-Qassam (a colleague of Sheikh Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam). Then he soon founded a private school in 1933 and called it Al-Istiqlal School...
He was elected vice-president of the first Arab Students Conference, which was held in Jaffa in 1929, and then he was elected president of the union during the second conference, which was held in Acre in 1930. He participated in establishing the Palestinian Independence Party, and was one of the leaders of the revolution. The British authorities arrested him in 1936, transferred him to the Great Prison of Acre, and sentenced him to death. The sentence was then commuted to 24 years, of which he spent six years in the “Al-Mazraa” Prison in Acre. He was released when World War II broke out, with the intention of winning over the Arabs.
Al-Tayeh did not stop his activity after his release from prison, so the British authorities imposed house arrest on him in his hometown of Tulkarm, then exiled him to Gaza, and from there to the Negev..
He had a strong relationship with the lawyer Ahmed Al-Shugairi, Sheikh Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam, the poets Abdul Karim Al-Karmi, Ibrahim Touqan, and Abdul Rahim Mahmoud, the leaders Abdul Rahim Al-Haj Mahm and Farhan Al-Saadi, the writer and historian Akram Zuaiter, and others...
After the student movement, he contributed to the revival of the labor movement. He founded the first Palestinian workers’ association in Tulkarm in 1943 and was elected its president. In 1947, he also worked with the Arab Higher Committee, where he was head of the national committees in the Arab Higher Committee headed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, and he was elected as a member of the National Council. The first Palestinian conference held in Gaza in 1948. He was appointed Minister of Education in the All-Palestine Government in 1948, but the government did not last long..
He immigrated to Saudi Arabia and worked in Riyadh for a short period. Then he returned to Palestine, and was elected as a member of the Tulkarm Municipal Council more than once, and was appointed director of the Nour al-Din Zenki School in the city until he was retired in 1971..
The poet Muhammad Ali Saleh Al-Tayeh died on March 10, 1989, at the age of 82. In Tulkarm, he was buried there.
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