Abe Fawal

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Ibrahim "Abe" Fawal (born July 29, 1933 in Ramallah, Palestine; died August 11, 2020 in Birmingham) was an educator and novelist.

Fawal was the son of Salem Mansour and Fareedeh Ankar Fawal. He spent his childhood in Palestine and fled during the "Nakba" (catastrophe) leading to the Arab-Isreali War of 1948. He emigrated to the United States in 1951 and enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College, graduating with a bachelor of arts in theater in 1954. He went on to complete a master's degree in film studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

While visiting his parents in Ramallah in 1960, Fawal met director David Lean and was hired to assist him in translating directions to Arab-speaking extras on the set of Lawrence of Arabia in the Jordanian desert. He was credited as a first assistant director on the film. He married the former Rose Rahib in Ramallah in 1961 and settled with her in Birmingham, raising four children: Salem, Gina, Freeda and Rima. He attended St Francis Xavier Catholic Church, and was naturalized as a United States citizen in 1967.

After returning to Birmingham, Fawal established Interlock Film Studio, where he produced several documentary films. He also worked for 25 years as a professor of film and literature at the UAB and Birmingham-Southern. He was a co-founder of the Birmingham International Educational Film Festival and a long-time member of the advisory board for Birmingham-Southern's Writing Today Conference.

Fawal moved to England in 1996 and began working on an examination of Arabian culture through the work of Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine for a Ph.D. dissertation at Oxford University's St Cross College. The work was published in 2002 by the British Film Institute and the University of California Press. After earning his diploma, he returned home to Crestwood.

Fawal also completed a novel, based on his own childhood experiences, called On the Hills of God. The book, published in 1998, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and has been translated into Arabic, Indonesian and German. His 2013 follow up novel, The Disinherited, was proposed as the middle volume in a "Palestine Trilogy".

Fawal died in 2020 and was buried at Elmwood Cemetery. He was survived by his four children and eleven grandchildren.

Publications

  • Fawal, Ibrahim (1998) On the Hills of God. Black Belt Press ISBN 9781588382047
  • Fawal, Ibrahim (2001) Youssef Chahine. British Film Institute ISBN 9780851708591
  • Fawal, Ibrahim (2013) The Disinherited. NewSouth Books ISBN 9781588382597

References

External links

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