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Muhammad Najati Sidqi

Personal Info

  • Country of residence: Greece
  • Gender: Male
  • Born in: 1905
  • Age: 117
  • Curriculum vitae :

Information

Muhammad Najati bin Bakr Sidqi Alai Amini (1905-1979) was a Palestinian writer and national activist, and one of the most important activists of the communist movement in the early Arab world. Najati Sidqi was famous for his numerous travels in the service of the Comintern and for his arguments with Khaled Bakdash, the historical leader of the Syrian Communist Party. Najati Sidqi has translated a number of Russian literature into Arabic, and has authored a number of books related to his literary criticism and political experience.

 

Although his name did not appear much in the Palestinian movement for independence, he played an important role in it, and witnessed many important moments at the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to his Arabic, he was fluent in French, Russian and Spanish. He participated with his father when Hussein bin Ali Sharif of Mecca launched the Arab revolution against the Ottoman Empire in 1916, and attended the beginning of the Zionist immigration to Palestine, and the early years of the establishment of communism in the Soviet Union, and he was one of the few Arabs who fought on the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of World War II, he wrote a book discussing the thesis of the incompatibility of Nazism with Islam.

 

his biography

Sidqi was born into a middle-class Palestinian family in Jerusalem in 1905. His father, Bakri Sidqi, was a teacher of Turkish origin, and his mother, Nazira Murad, was from a prominent Jerusalem merchant family. He taught in the school of Salih (Jerusalem), then at the Rashidiya School (Jerusalem), the Mamounia, and the Royal Office in Jerusalem. After learning in his childhood there, he joined his father in 1914, where the latter worked in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, and in his formative years he grew up in Damascus, Cairo and Jeddah in the Hijaz, where his father Bakri joined the campaign of Faisal I. Against the Wahhabis On his return to Palestine, he became an employee of the Post and Telegraph Department in Mandatory Palestine. There he met Jewish workers who introduced him to communism. He spent three years, from 1925 to 1928, at the Communist Comintern University of the Toilers of the East, and the three years passed by presenting a thesis on "The Arab National Movement from the Federal Coup to the Era of the National Bloc", during which time he married a Ukrainian communist. He had contacts with Joseph Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Khaled Bekdash, the Kurdish leader of the Syrian Communist Party, met with Mao Zedong and got acquainted with the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and members of the Jawaharlal family. Nehru. He returned with his wife to Palestine in 1928, and the couple began organizing activities against the British Mandate authorities.

 

When the riots broke out in 1929 called the Al-Buraq Revolution, the Jewish communists were divided between those who sympathized with the victims of the massacres, and others (such as the Arab communists) who considered this to be an Arab revolution against the British occupation, the seizure of land and the impoverishment of the peasants. In Haifa, where Sedky supervised the local branch of the party, Sedky maintained regular contacts with Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, describing the latter's death in 1935 as a testimony. The Comintern instructed the Palestinian Communist Party to Arabize in 1924, but with little success. One of the tasks assigned to the party was to implement this Arabization. The Palestine branch of the Communist Party was largely dominated by Jews of socialist inclination, and it was suspected of having militants sympathetic to Zionism. In 1930, the British police arrested Sidqi in Jaffa and sentenced him to two years' imprisonment, which he spent in prisons in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre. His older brother Ahmed, with whom he also studied at the Communist University, was the main witness at the trial. Sedky describes his brother Ahmed as "fragile" and that he was forced to confess to the beating. On the other hand, British reports described him as a police informant, who provided extensive details about the Comintern. In late 1932, on the occasion of his release from prison (the place where he became acquainted with the "Dillinger of the Desert"), the party ordered him to contact Awni Abd al-Hadi in order to coordinate with the Istiqlal Party. With the intensification of British surveillance, the Communist Party smuggled him abroad in June 1933 to Paris, where he became editor-in-chief of the Arabic-speaking Comintern magazine, whose name was the Arab East.At this time, Sedky took the pseudonym “Mustafa Al-Omari.” This newspaper continued to publish until it was suspended by French Prime Minister Laval in 1936.

 

The French authorities arrested him later and deported him to Palestine. He later chronicled his opposition to Nazism in this period - which coincided with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933.

 

In 1935 he was sent to Tashkent to study the topic of nationality under communism. While in Uzbekistan, he developed close ties with the two Uzbek communist leaders Akmal Ikramov and Faizullah Khojayev. Both sided with Nikolai Bukharin's agrarian policies, which went against the line set by Stalin, and had informed him of the ideas of the Left Opposition to Stalinism associated with Grigory Zinoviev. His two Uzbek friends were murdered shortly thereafter, both victims of Stalin's Great Purge. Sidqi had first-hand experience with Nazi Germany as well, having traveled across the country in 1936, and when party loyalty later imposed silence after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he refused to obey and could not hide his disagreement.

 

literary activities

His book "An Arab who fought in Spain" was published under the name of Khaled Bakdash, his Kurdish opponent within the Communist Party, which increased his hostility to Bakdash and the party. A number of differences emerged between them regarding the issue of Arab unity, as Najati Sidqi (representing the Palestinian branch of the party) believed that revolutionary action should be directed, in addition to the endeavor to achieve social justice, to achieving Arab unity, while Khaled Bakdash was He believes in the necessity of achieving socialism in each country separately, before achieving Arab unity.

His writings

Memoirs of Najati Sidqi, edited by Hanna Abu Hanna, Beirut, 2001.

Moscow Post (translation), 1960

Golden Beetle (translation)

Pushkin: Prince of Russian Poets, Dar Al-Mada for Culture and Publishing.

Girl and Gold (translation)

Sad sisters

Selected Stories from Chinese Literature, Beirut Printing and Publishing House, 1954.

Selected Stories from Spanish Literature, Beirut Printing and Publishing House.

Islamic traditions and Nazi principles Do you agree? A socio-political-religious scientific paper, 1940.

Chekhov, House of Knowledge, 1967.

Peter Zinger: Founder of Freedom of the Press in the New World (translation), 1955

Carmen (translation), Oweidat Publications, 1962.

Behind the Wires (translation), 1951

The Battle of Shiloh, Dar al-Kitab (translation), 1952

Von Ban Speaks, Qafat Press (translation), 1952

Selected Stories from Russian Literature, Beirut Printing and Publishing House (translation), 1952

For the sake of a woman (translation)

The bored widow, 1953

Maxim Gorky, House of Knowledge

The Black Cat and Other Stories, Mahrousa Center (translation)

The Millionaire Communist, Dar Al-Kitab, Beirut, 1963.

Irma's Voyage: The Greatest Sea Adventure in Pursuit of Freedom.

The Reapers: A picture of the heroism in love and jihad, House of Culture, Beirut

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Achievements and Awards

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