Prominent Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouthi gave a recital to a packed audience at the Hikmat Al-Masri Theatre of the new campus of the University on Sunday 23^rd September.
The audience of almost two thousand listened avidly to the inspirational and moving poems in hushed appreciation. Al-Barghouti’s excellence in the field of poetry was underlined when he won fifth place in an Arabic poetry competition organized by an Abu Dhabi television station earlier this month.Among the attendants were the University President, Dr. Rami Hamdallah, members of the Board of Trustees of the University, PLC members, prominent figures of Nablus as well as citizens, students and academics.
Even though Nablus had been under attack by Israeli occupation forces for four days during the week of the event, people were eager to attend, an indication of their thirst for cultural activities in a city that has been besieged for the past seven years.
“The phenomenon of Tamim Al-Barghouthi came just in time. The audience is eager to listen to poetry and to hear about Palestine and national unity. Tamim seems to be a prominent, highly educated poet, and most importantly self-confident, and for that the audience listened carefully to his poetry.”
At the end of the event, the University President presented to Tamim Al-Barghouthi the University Plaque for his contribution to Palestinian and Arab culture.
Al-Barghouti was born in Cairo in 1977 to an Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father. He has written four collections of poetry, Meejana (Ramallah, 1999), Al-Manzar (Cairo, 2000), Qaluli Bethebb Masr (Cairo, 2005) and Maqam Iraq (Cairo, 2005). Tamim Al- Barghouti uses classical Arabic and the colloquial dialects of Palestine, Egypt and Iraq. He earned a PhD in political science from Boston University in 2004, and became an assistant professor at the American University in Cairo in 2005. In 2003 and 2004 he wrote a weekly column in the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper, on colonialism and Arab history and identity.