With the passing of Izhaq Abdel Mahdi Mahmoud al-Hroub, known affectionately as Abu Iyad, on the evening of 26 June 2025, in the city of Hebron, Palestine bids farewell to one of its most dedicated sons. At 84 years old, Al-Hroub leaves behind not just a legacy, but a world – a life’s work devoted to preserving the rural soul of Palestine. In a time of displacement, conflict and erasure, he stood as a steadfast guardian of memory and meaning.

Al-Hroub was not a historian in the conventional sense, nor a museum curator by formal training. He was something more enduring: a living archive of Palestinian village life. He was a storyteller, an artisan, a musician and, above all, a devoted cultural preservationist. His mission was not merely to collect – but to revive, to share, and to educate.

Born in 1941 in Deir Samet, a village to the west of Hebron, Al-Hroub grew up surrounded by the textures and sounds of Palestinian rural life. His father was known for his role in mediating local disputes; his mother was a keeper of folk songs; and his young widowed aunt passed down the traditional crafts and skills of a self-reliant generation. From these influences, Al-Hroub developed a rich appreciation for intangible heritage – oral narratives, craft traditions and folk rituals.

The Nakba of 1948, a defining rupture in Palestinian history, occurred when he was still a young child. It marked him deeply. The forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including many from villages like his own, would shape the moral compass of his life’s work. For Al-Hroub, the past was not a lost paradise, but a call to action: if something is at risk of vanishing, it must be preserved – not through nostalgia alone, but through dedication, documentation and creative labour.

While working as a schoolteacher, al-Hroub used his modest income to acquire household items and tools from displaced Palestinian families. These items – though no longer used in refugee camps or urban life – carried the essence of rural existence. He retired from teaching in 1990, the same year he publicly displayed his growing collection for the first time during the Culture and Media Festival, which he organised at St George’s School in Jerusalem.

That moment marked the beginning of a new chapter. Al-Hroub’s efforts transitioned from individual passion to national contribution. Over the following decades, he amassed one of the most remarkable private ethnographic collections in Palestine, filled with thousands of artifacts, tools, textiles and ceremonial items. These were not presented as static objects in glass cases – they were alive, interpreted within context, and infused with story.

A major portion of his collection was housed at Qal’at Murad (Murad Castle), a seventeenth-century Ottoman fortress located in the village of Artas, south of Bethlehem. Built by Sultan Murad IV to protect the water system of Solomon’s Pools (Roman and Ottoman periods), the castle was converted into a museum under al-Hroub’s guidance. The museum became a destination for scholars, students and tourists alike, offering a tangible journey into the Palestinian rural past. The rest of the collection remained at his home in Deir Samet, where visitors could experience the depth of his knowledge firsthand.

His exhibits weren’t about spectacle. They were about continuity. Al-Hroub meticulously reconstructed wedding processions, ritual feasts and harvest ceremonies. He documented seven-day weddings in both peasant and Bedouin traditions, preserved song lyrics in their original dialects, and explained the meanings behind tools, foods, garments and gestures. Every object was accompanied by annotations; every room told a story.

He spoke Arabic and English, played the rababah (a traditional bowed string instrument) and the mizmar (a traditional wind instrument), and often sang melodies from the folk traditions he was safeguarding. These performances were not for entertainment – they were expressions of memory, and acts of cultural resistance.

Although he never held an academic title, al-Hroub was a scholar of the land, a grassroots ethnographer whose insights rivalled those of university researchers. His depth of fieldwork and intuitive analysis turned his museum into what some described as a three-dimensional ethnographic manuscript. In 2015, though, he preserved some of his knowledge for wider audiences, publishing the first edition of his landmark book, the Atlas of Palestinian Rural Heritage. For this he was a co-recipient with me of the Nada Al-Atrash Prize for Creative Writing in 2021 at the Dar Al-Sabbagh Centre, the Centre for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Bethlehem. The work was later expanded and reissued in a bilingual Arabic-English edition in 2024, featuring 575 original photographs. This second edition was published by AphorismA-Verlag in Berlin, with the support of the Bible + Orient Museum in Fribourg, Switzerland. The museum’s ethnography curator, Thomas Staubli, closely collaborated with Al-Hroub during the fieldwork and editing phases, recognising his contribution as both unique and indispensable.

Al-Hroub's commitment was not confined to memory. It was a forward-looking vision for cultural continuity – a belief that the knowledge of the past must be transmitted to the future. He gave countless talks at local schools and universities, guided students through his museum, and mentored young researchers in understanding the nuances of Palestinian rural life. He lived modestly, yet left behind a treasure trove of cultural wealth. In every woven basket, in every shepherd’s cloak, in every rusted olive press in his collection, there echoed a call to remember – and to resist forgetting.

With his passing, Palestine has lost a guardian of memory, a humble chronicler whose life was an act of devotion to a people and their land. But his legacy lives on – in the museum rooms of Qal'at Murad, in the pages of his atlas, in the melodies of wedding songs, and in the hearts of those who had the honour of learning from him.

Rest in peace, Abu Iyad.

The lanterns you lit in the darkness of oblivion shall never be extinguished.

May your spirit live on in the warmth of the heritage you rescued, loved and gave back to life.

العنوان

Loay

الناشر

Taylor and Francis

بلد الناشر

المملكة المتحدة

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

معامل التأثير

0,5

نوع المنشور

Both (Printed and Online)

المجلد

2

السنة

2025

الصفحات

1