Ibrahim Muhawi

Ibrahim Muhawi (born 1937, ) is a Palestinian academic and writer, specializing in Palestinian and Arabic literature, folklore and translation. He is a member of the Palestinian diaspora.

Career Muhawi was born in Ramallah in 1937 to a Palestinian Christian Arab family. and, after graduating from the Friends Boys' School in that city, he transferred to the United States in 1959, settling in San Francisco.where he gained a degree in electrical engineering at Heald Engineering College. Drawn to literature in the meantime, he took out a B.A. in English (1964: magna cum laude) from California State University at Hayward, and went on to obtain an M.A. (1966) and a Ph.D. (1969), in the same subject from the University of California, Davis. Courtesy Professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Oregon in Eugene (2007).

Muhawi is a world authority on the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and has translated both his memoir of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the poet's experience of house arrest, detentions in prison and interrogations by Israeli soldiers interrogators.

Views on Palestinian diaspora (shatat) Muhawi notes that the Balfour Declaration, with its outline of a policy of establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, referred to the actual historic majority of the population in purely negative terms: indigenous Palestinians were 'non-Jews', as the phrasing in the document, 'the existing non-Jewish population', shows. Churchill, Muhawi argues, was following a long line of earlier writers in dumbing down Palestinians to a bestial level, and the tradition was still alive, with Menachem Begin likening Palestinians to cockroaches, and Golda Meir denying them out of existence.

In 2024, he won the 2023 Translation Award at the 12th annual Palestine Book Awards (PBA) for Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir, originally written by Hussein Barghouthi.

Translations with Sharif Kanaana, Speak, bird, speak again:Palestinian Arab folk tales, University of California Press 1989 (available on-line here), featuring Palestinian hikaye Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Memory for Forgetfulness,(Dhākira li l-nisyān) University of California Press,1995. This is, for Muhawi, a 'quintessential piece of diasporic literature.' Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Journal of an ordinary grief, (Yawmiyyât al-Huzn al-‘Âdî, 1973) Steerforth Press, 2012