This evening at 6.30 p.m., the Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos (Calle Francisco de Asís Méndez Casariego, 1) will host a tribute to the Palestinian-Spanish professor, poet and translator Mahmud Sobh, who passed away on 21 February in Madrid.
Dr Rasha Ismail, director of the Institute, and Abdo Tounsi, president of CIHAR, are organising this tribute, which they have called Homenaje a Mahmud Sobh, hispalestino o viceversa (Homage to Mahmud Sobh, Palestinian or vice versa).
Mahmud Sobh was the first Arab university professor to obtain a chair in Spain. He arrived in Spain on 14 March 1965. He was born in 1936 in Safad, a place in Galilee (Palestine), near Nazareth. In 1948 he took refuge with his family in Damascus as a consequence of the creation of the state of Israel. In 1954 he began working as a primary school teacher in a Syrian village, and in the same year he had a poem published in a literary magazine. In 1961 he graduated from the University of Damascus with a degree in Arabic Language and Literature, and three years later became a teacher at the Normal School in Oran, Algeria. In 1965 he was appointed headmaster of a secondary school in Homs (Syria).
That same year he arrived in Madrid to begin his doctoral studies at the Complutense University of Madrid; in 1967 he defended his doctoral thesis, entitled La poesía amorosa arábigo-andaluza (the Library has on display in this exhibition his 1966 dissertation entitled La poesía amorosa en la literatura árabe clásica), and in 1968 he was hired as a lecturer in the Department of Arabic and Islam at the UCM, where he pursued his academic career until his retirement. In 1979 he was granted Spanish nationality; a few years later he was appointed Professor of Arabic Language and Literature (1985) and in 2001 he won the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies. He has also taught at the Spanish-Arab Institute of Culture and at the Diplomatic School.
