Hamza Bogary Explained

Hamza Mohammad Bogary or Boqari[1] (Arabic: حمزة محمد بوقري) (1932–1984) was an Arabic author from Mecca who also worked in broadcasting, becoming Director General of Broadcasting; from 1965 to 1967, he served as Saudi Arabia's Deputy Minister of Information.[2] In 1967, he became a cofounder of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Of his writings, the best known outside of Arabia is his "lightly fictionalized memoir" Saqifat al-Safa (Arabic: سقيفة الصفا), translated into English as The Sheltered Quarter: "His descriptions of school and family life resemble closely what we know of a male student's rounds in eighteenth-century Mecca. The book is a Meccan bildungsroman, calling up those final days before the oil boom that transformed Saudi Arabia and the Hajj."[3]

Bibliography

Notes and References

  1. http://waqf.kau.edu.sa/content.aspx?Site_ID=808&lng=EN&cid=3310&URL=www.kau.edu.sa King Abdulaziz University list of founders
  2. http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/bogshp.html Brief biography
  3. Michael Wolfe, One Thousand Roads to Mecca (Grove Press, 1999:), p. 441.