Ibrahim Al-Arrayedh

Ibrahim Al-Arrayedh (1908–2002) was a Bahraini poet and writer, widely regarded as the most influential literary figure of modern Bahrain and the leader of its literary movement through the twentieth century. Born in Bombay to a Bahraini father and an Iraqi mother, he spent his working life as a teacher, customs official and oil-company employee while writing and translating poetry across Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English; in the early 1970s he chaired the council that drafted Bahrain's first constitution, and in 2006 his Manama house became the Ebrahim Al-Arrayedh Poetry House. ^{1 2}

Al-Arrayedh was born in Bombay, India, on 8 March 1908; his father came from Manama and his mother from Iraq. He first visited Bahrain in 1922, aged fourteen, and studied at the Hidaya al-Khalifa School, the island's first formal school, before returning to Bombay to finish his schooling and going on to Aligarh Muslim University, where his love of Urdu literature deepened; he became fluent in Persian, English and Urdu as well as Arabic. Back in Bahrain in 1927 he taught English at the Hidaya school for four years, then became deputy director of the Jafari School, resigning after disputes with the British colonial authorities. He worked as a treasurer in the state customs service, headed a translation department from 1937 until the Second World War closed the company, worked at a Delhi radio station in 1943, and then joined the Bahrain Petroleum Company, remaining until his retirement in 1967. In 1974 he was appointed ambassador-at-large and later ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary at the foreign ministry. ¹

He began writing poetry at eighteen, and his first collection was published in Baghdad in 1931. His translations carried poetry between Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English, and his work found readers in Iraq, Syria and Egypt; the American University of Beirut invited him to lecture on Arab literature. Among his books are To Bethlehem, on the Palestinian struggle; Bitter Bread, on poverty and social injustice; and The Tragedy of Being, on human existence, while his Poems of Bahrain portrays the country's cultural and social landscape. He founded a school of his own, and Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa appointed him head of the Constitutional Council tasked with drafting Bahrain's first constitution ahead of independence from Britain. He died in May 2002 — Wikidata gives 28 May — at the age of ninety-four, following respiratory complications, and was buried in the Manama Graveyard beside his daughter Layla. King Hamad named a Manama road after him; his Gudaibiya residence was opened in 2006 as the Ebrahim Al-Arrayedh Poetry House, and in 2008 UNESCO honoured his legacy with an exhibition at its Paris headquarters. ^{1 2}

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