Khalil Beidas

Who was Khalil Beidas?

Khalil Beidas was a Palestinian Christian scholar, educator, translator and novelist. Beidas was the father of Palestinian Lebanese banker Yousef Beidas and was a cousin of Edward Said's father according to Said's autobiography.

Alongside contemporaries such as Khalil al-Sakakini, Muhammad Izzat Darwazeh and Najib Nassar, Beidas was one of Palestine's foremost intellectuals in the early twentieth century during the Al-Nahda cultural renaissance. Beidas was the pioneer of the modern Levantine short-story and novel. He was also a prolific translator—as early as 1898, he had translated some of the works of Tolstoy and Pushkin into Arabic. In addition, he established a magazine, "an-Nafa'is al-'Asriyyah", which acquired a good name in literary circles both in the Ottoman vilayet of Syria and the Palestinian Diaspora.