Fatima al-Budeiri

Fatima al-Budeiri was born in Jerusalem in 1923 into an old, illustrious family in Jerusalem. Her father, Shaykh Musa al-Budeiri, was a judge in the sharia [Islamic law] court and a religious scholar trained at al-Azhar in Cairo. She had two brothers: the ophthalmologist and renowned nationalist figure Dr. Khalil al-Budeiri and another who was an engineer. Her husband, Issam Hammad, was journalist and poet. They had two sons; the elder son, Mahdi, works as a filmmaker for Jordanian state television.

She became proficient in classical Arabic under the tutelage of her father, who encouraged both his sons and his daughters to read and memorize verses from the Qur’an daily. She received her high school diploma from the Schmidt College for Girls and then obtained her diploma in education from Dar al-Muʿallimat, the [women's] Teachers’ Training College in Jerusalem, in 1941. She first worked as an Arabic language teacher at a school in Bethlehem and then taught at the Rural Teachers’ Training College in Ramallah.

In 1946 Budeiri changed careers to work as a radio broadcaster at the Palestinian radio station Huna al-Quds [Jerusalem Calling], which had been launched at the end of March 1936. The station offered programs in three languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and English. The Arabic section was supervised first by Ibrahim Tuqan, then by Ajaj Nuwayhed, and then by Azmi al-Nashashibi. She describes how she joined the radio team: “I wasn’t particularly interested in radio. By chance, I heard about a call or an application for new broadcasters, so I applied along with the others. So many youngsters applied, both men and women. After I submitted my application, I got a callback to audition for a voice test. I read out loud as I usually do, since I am an Arabic language teacher and well-versed in how to declaim properly. I passed and they hired me the very next day.”

Even though Fatima al-Budeiri’s father was an al-Azhar-educated shaykh and a sharia court judge, and faced enormous pressure by those who thought women's voices should not be heard in the public domain, he did not explicitly object when his daughter quit her teaching job to join the radio broadcasting service. This is how she described the reactions of people at the time: “The reaction was awful. People made me a nervous wreck. They forgot all about the atom bomb in Japan, and talked only about me, and how my dad was a judge, a shaykh and a religious judge who gave lessons at the mosque. They made such a huge deal of it and considered it a major sin. How could I go and work in the news media and sit there with men and be a broadcaster as a woman with the rest of them?! They were all men there, the announcers, including my husband. He was a broadcaster too and I was his assistant.” As for her father’s reaction when she returned home after her first day at the job, she said, “He didn't say much. I don't know if deep down he was all right with it or not, because it was a really difficult situation, even more so for my family, and they had to endure a lot, especially my mom. Sure, she was my mother and she was educated and knew how to read and write, but still something like this wasn’t acceptable to her. I can still remember it, and I regret that I did this to her.”

At that time, Budeiri was one of the first Arab women to enter the field of radio broadcasting in the Arab world, alongside the two Egyptian broadcasters Safiya al-Muhandis and Tamadur Tawfiq. Her work was not limited to presenting the news bulletins; she also supervised the section for women’s and children’s programming and participated in presenting various cultural programs. She and Issam Hammad (who will become her husband later one) acted in several radio plays, a move that was not well-received within her family. On this matter, she comments: “Yes, we acted. My acting made it even worse for people. It caused quite an uproar at the time... How could I—the daughter of a shaykh and judge, with one brother who’s a doctor and another an engineer—act!?”

After the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the Nakba in 1948, the radio came under dual control, with the fledgling Israeli government taking over the broadcasting station in Jerusalem and the Jordanian government taking over the transmitters, engineering equipment, and broadcasting facilities in Ramallah. Fatima al-Budeiri moved to Ramallah to work at the radio station.

In 1949, Budeiri married the journalist and poet Issam Hammad, who had been working at the Huna al-Quds radio station since 1944. In 1950, Budeiri and her husband moved to Syria to work at Damascus Radio, where they had a distinguished role to play as pioneers in this field.

While working at this radio station, a remarkable incident happened to her. One Friday, while she was doing her shift as the broadcaster, the station played a sermon by the famous Syrian sharia court judge Ali al-Tantawi live from one of the city's mosques, in which he criticized both the Syrian government and the people. The station director held Budeiri responsible and decided to fire her. However, his decision was met with a broad solidarity campaign for her. In addition, the Syrian parliament convened a special session and rejected holding her responsible. Thus, the station director was compelled to reinstate her to her position.

After their contract at Damascus Radio ended in 1952, Budeiri and her husband moved back to Palestine and settled in Ramallah. Hammad continued his work in radio and went back to his old job as program director at the same radio station now called the “Jordanian Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem”; she went back to work as an educator. Later on, the radio station hired her as its daily news anchor.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s nationalist government under prime minister Suleiman al-Nabulsi in April 1957, Hammad was harassed by the Jordanian police for his nationalist and leftist political positions and sentenced to prison. He was forced to go back to Damascus to seek refuge there. His wife joined him and they remained there for a year, during which they could not work. Then, in 1958, Budeiri and her husband moved to East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, to work in the Arabic section of its broadcasting service. They stayed at this job for about seven years, presenting news bulletins and writing commentaries on the news, though the Arabic service had a limited audience, which upset Budeiri. She lamented that the radio station “remained obscure and there were no listeners. It pained me, actually it pained both of us [her husband], but he was never one to complain. But I’m telling you in all honesty, it felt like trying to inflate a leaking balloon, but what could we do? We were forced to stay. And they did welcome us and treat us well, actually they gave us a lot of respect. In any case he [Hammad] worked at German radio with the same dedication and application he had given to his work in Arab countries."

After the Jordanian monarchy issued a general amnesty for all political dissidents in 1965, Budeiri returned to Ramallah with her husband. There, she worked as a schoolteacher and then as a librarian at the teacher training college run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Two years later, in 1967, she and her husband left Ramallah for Amman, where Budeiri joined the teaching staff at the UNRWA schools and taught there from 1967 to 1971. Then, from 1978 to 1983, she worked in the cataloging department at the University of Jordan’s central library in Amman, in addition to working at the Jordanian House for Culture and Media. While living there, Budeiri (who was also fluent in German and English) took part in many Arab and international conferences, and her professional career was the subject of many studies and scholarly research in the field of media studies and the role played by Arab women in the media.

Budeiri passed away in early June 2009 in Amman, three years after the death of her husband. Her dream of “seeing a liberated Palestine” and being buried in Jerusalem, which she considered “the most beautiful city in the whole world,” remained unrealized. She was buried in Amman. She summed up the story of her life with these words: “The story of my life ... it's the same as everyone else’s. It's a tragedy of history, both of recent history and history of long ago, a history soaked in humiliation and degradation, draped in misery and sorrow, abounding in hardship, and dripping with blood.”

Fatima al-Budeiri is known as one of the first women radio broadcasters in the Arab world, and the first woman to sit behind the microphone to read out news bulletins to her listeners, which until then had been the exclusive reserve of men. In his book Qalat lana al-Quds [Thus Spoke Jerusalem to Us], the Palestinian author Mahmoud Shuqair (also from Jerusalem) says about her: “The Jerusalemite Fatima al-Budeiri was perhaps one of the most daring of the city’s daughters in the 1930s and the years that followed, when she joined the Palestinian Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem to work as a broadcaster and a program producer. For her at that time, as a woman, to work in a milieu where the overwhelming majority of those working there were men, and for her feminine voice to be broadcast across the airwaves, reaching so many people in so many different places, was considered a most unusual intrusion into a domain that at the time was itself considered unusual.”  Fayha’ Abdul Hadi writes about her: “When the name of Fatima Musa al-Budeiri, the illustrious radio broadcaster from Jerusalem, is mentioned, it is done in the context of her role as a trailblazer in the field of professional radio work, when women began to be news bulletin anchors, whereas previously they had been limited to reading out an assortment of articles from the variety segment. This made her the first female newscaster in the Palestinian Broadcasting Service. She is also remembered as a trailblazer in her society, for she rebelled against social customs and traditions of her time that forbade women from working in fields that were unfamiliar to society, such as radio broadcasting.”

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