Khalil al-Sakakini

Khalil al-Sakakini was born into an Arab Christian family in Jerusalem and studied in Jerusalem and the United Kingdom before teaching in New York and returning to Palestine. In 1909, he founded the revolutionary Dusturiyya (Constitutional) National School in Jerusalem, abolishing corporal punishment, grades, and rote memorization in favor of physical education, music, critical inquiry, and mutual respect.

Sakakini authored the famous Arabic reading primer Al-Jadid, which taught generations of Arab children to read through whole-word recognition rather than mechanical spelling. His intimate, deeply moving diaries, posthumously published as Kadha Ana Ya Dunya (Such Am I, O World), record his profound love for Jerusalem, his grief over the loss of his library in Katamon in 1948, and his humanist philosophy.