Summary
A pan-Arab secular nationalist of Palestinian Chicago’s generation of 1948–1967, co-founder of the Arab Community Center (Chicago), and father of Hatem Abudayyeh; Chapter 2 opens with his recitation and uses his self-presentation to delineate a specifically Palestinian Secularism (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.79, p.82).
Details
- Khairy Abudayyeh (“Abu Hatem,” 1940–2019) was seventy-two and recovering from surgery when he recited Iskandar al-Khouri al-Beit Jali’s poem of Arab unity from memory and denounced “the religious fever”: “The solution does not come from God, it comes from us!” (PDF p.79).
- He had memorized the poem as a schoolboy in the West Bank village of al-Jib, where his teachers backed the Movement of Arab Nationalists and students protested the 1955 Baghdad Pact; his own secularism stemmed, on his account, from the memory of his father participating alongside veterans of the Great Arab Revolt (1916–18) to fight the British during the 1936–39 Arab Revolt — the memory is Khairy Abudayyeh’s, of his father — and to his childhood distribution of food to Palestinian fighters in 1948 (PDF p.79, p.82).
- He attended a government school in his village and immigrated to the United States in 1960, aged twenty, joining his father and brother in Chicago; he helped his brother’s business, took sporadic courses at Roosevelt University, and spent most of his working life as a purchasing agent for the Guarantee Trust Life Insurance Company (PDF p.83-84).
- With Ali Hussain and Samir Odeh he helped found the Arab Community Center (Chicago) in 1972 (PDF p.86).
- On Oslo he said: “Oslo discouraged everybody [among the secular nationalists],” and religious critics told the secularists, “Your cause is useless! See what nationalism did to you! See what Communism did to you! See what Arafat did to you!” — “We didn’t have an answer” (PDF p.89).
Related pages
Hatem Abudayyeh · Arab Community Center (Chicago) · Secularism · Palestinian Chicago