PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 157

Excellence: A Palestinian woman’s duty Tamam Al Ghul, 81 years old What did little girls born in 1930s Palestine dream of? They wanted to learn, but they were not always granted their wish since most families looked first to the education of their boys. That, at least, is what Tamam Al Ghul remembers when she speaks of her childhood in Silwan, which is just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. She is lucky enough to have had brothers who fought for her so that she could go to school. At school and in life, as a female and a Palestinian, and later a Jordanian, 1 Tamam understood that she had to strive to be the best if she wanted to exist. This attitude explains how she came to play an important role in the highest circles of Jor- danian decision-making and in international organiza- tions. A role that has always led her back, from near or far, to her town, Jerusalem.  Like every Friday, around 11 am, my paternal grandparents, Khader and Tamam, had set off on the little path between Silwan and the Old City of Jeru- salem. After a 20-minute walk, they entered the city through the Lion Gate, Bab Al Asbat and went to the Al Aqsa mosque. Like every Friday, after prayers, they went to the vegetable market. There they greeted their friends and neighbours and the stallholders, without for a minute suspecting that they were living their final moments. A bomb placed by Irgun, a terrorist Zion- ist organization, mowed them down. It was 1938, ten years before the creation of the State of Israel. My father, Ali, was not there: he had been forced to go and hide far away from Jerusalem, on the other side of the Jordan River, with a group of opponents to the British mandate. My mother, Maryam, was pregnant and had stayed in Silwan with their six children. It was not the first time that my father had been forced to flee this way: the British government imprisoned and severely punished those who dared to contest its pol- icies in the region since the Sykes–Picot Agreement. 2 When he learned that the hour of my birth was approaching, my father sent his family a telegram: if I was a boy, he wanted to name me Khader after his father, otherwise Tamam, after his mother. The day I was born, December 13, 1938, the mukhtar 3 who was in charge of registering births in Silwan duly noted that Tamam Al Ghul had come into the world; but since he only went to Jerusalem once a week, the date of my birth was only registered officially five days later, on 18 December, along with that of all the children born in Silwan that week. But here was the thing; when my aunts heard the news, they were not at all happy that I had been named after their mother; if someone were to get cross with me and call me Tamam in anger, it would have insulted the memory of my grandmother. That is why, as a conciliatory gesture, my father suggested nicknaming me Um Al Kheir (Mother of Goodness). Tamam 155