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Hasan Karmi

Broadcaster and lexicographer


Friday, 18 May 2007
Hasan Said Karmi, broadcaster and lexicographer: born Tulkarm, Ottoman Empire 1905; MBE 1969; married 1931 Amina Rifai (died 1991; one son, two daughters); died Amman 5 May 2007.


It's hard to know how exactly the life of Hasan Karmi would have turned out had he not been, as a literate and talented 42-year-old schools inspector, forced, like so many of his countrymen, to flee with his wife and three children from a Jerusalem at war in 1948.

But as a Palestinian exile who spent much of the second half of his life in London, Karmi rose to become a distinguished lexicographer and a leading figure in the BBC Arabic Service. In particular he started in 1952 and presented for another 37 years the literary programme Qawlun 'ala Qawl ("A Saying Upon a Saying") which enjoyed great popularity throughout the Arab world.

Hasan Said Karmi was born under Turkish rule in June or July 1905 (his mother said it was in the apricot season, he himself that it was that of watermelons) in the then largely agricultural community of Tulkarm, in what is now the northern West Bank. When a locust invasion 1914 devastated farms in the district, he and his siblings almost starved. But his father, Sheikh Said al-Karmi, was also a Sharia judge, writer and poet whose death sentence for opposition to the Ottomans was commuted to an imprisonment that ended only in 1918. His older brother Ahmad Shakir started the first literary journal in Palestine; a younger one, Abdul-Karim, was a well-known nationalist poet.

British rule in Palestine began for Karmi what his youngest child, the Anglo-Palestinian academic, political activist and writer Ghada Karmi would describe as "a love-hate relationship" with the British during the period of the mandate. "Here was a people whose language and literature he admired, but the same people were blatantly facilitating the Zionist takeover of his country."

He was educated in Tulkarm and Damascus. But it was his studies at the English College in Jerusalem, and his subsequent dealings with mandate officials (he started his professional career as a maths teacher in Ramleh) that fostered his lifelong fascination with the English language as well as Arabic. "Unlike other young Palestinian men he joined no political movement," wrote Ghada Karmi, "but single-mindedly pursued his study of English and mathematics."

In the early 1940s he nevertheless lived in fear of his life. The family supported Raghib al-Nashashibi, the Jerusalem mayor in favour of a negotiated agreement with the British to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine, and opposed the Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

It was perhaps not surprising that after the family fled Palestine for Damascus in what to Israelis was the "War of Independence" but to Palestinians the "Nakba" or disaster, he chose to work in London rather than in the Arab world, arranging for his - deeply reluctant - wife and three children to join him in the summer of 1949. He had studied in London for a year in 1937 and 1945, each time as a British government scholar; he applied, and got, a job in the BBC Arabic Service, which he already admired as a listener.

Karmi, searching for a quiet and respectable family house, was advised by a colleague to take one in Golders Green, well known as a neighbourhood of Jewish refugees from Hitler. This was perhaps less incongruous than it seems; the family found a Jewish GP as they had had in Jerusalem. His children made Jewish schoolfriends. Karmi would later tell his daughter that at the time he blamed British betrayal more than the Jews for the dispossession of the Palestinians. Ghada Karmi makes the point in her memoir In Search of Fatima that despite their profound and irrevocable sense of grievance against Zionism and about 1948, the "gut anti-Semitism" the family encountered among some of their English neighbours was "alien to us".

Hasan Karmi rose quickly to prominence in the BBC, interviewing many of the leading personalities in the Arab world. In 1952 he began recording his weekly literary programme, Qawlun 'ala Qawl. He had a unique rapport with his listeners, many of whom wrote in with often obscure queries about some poetic fragment, guaranteed in return an erudite and entertaining reply from the presenter.

So popular was the programme that when Karmi retired in 1968, the BBC asked him to continue it. For the next 20 years he went into Bush House once a week to record the show, rather like - as his daughter wrote - an "Arab Alistair Cooke". Karmi was 82 when it was finally taken off the air, the longest-running programme on the BBC Arabic Service.

At the same time, Karmi was working in his spare time on his dictionaries. The first, an English-Arabic dictionary called Al Manar ("The Lighthouse"), was published in 1970, the last (of 11 of varying sizes) in 2001. His stated purpose was to promote an exact understanding of Arabic through English, and the converse. He had a theory that having learnt colloquial Arabic as children before progressing to the much more precise written form, and because language is so crucial to the development of thought, Arabs were often handicapped by a lack of precision in their thinking. This, he believed, was a factor behind the relatively poor Arab scientific and other intellectual performance relative to its supremacy in the period of classical Islam.

Karmi was unrepentant about his decision to bring his wife and family to London, telling his British-educated younger daughter that she would otherwise have been "married off to some Bedouin". But in 1989, their children grown, he and his wife went to live in Amman, where he spent the rest of his life.

Lucid and intellectually coherent throughout his old age, he became increasingly preoccupied with the old Jewish and Protestant idea of "chosenness" and the hegemony of the "Judaeo-Christian West" typified, in his eyes, by an American disregard for law and decency and its support for an equally, as he saw it, lawless Israel. Receiving a British visitor with great courtesy at the age of 100, he was eager to talk about the role that Tony Blair's Christianity had played in his foreign policy. Confessing that she was saddened and at times angry that her father's fine mind had been taken over by this "obsession", Ghada Karmi nevertheless wrote: "I think I understand and it fills me with pity . . .

Perhaps for a while even, his intellectual preoccupations had compensated for the loss of his homeland. But it caught up with him in the end, finding expression I believe in this elaborate, vehement theorising - in reality, a surrogate for the pain, grief and anger he has held in for most of his life, and a way of making sense to himself of a cruel destiny he had never sought.

Donald Macintyre