Hamza Bogary

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

References

  1. ^ King Abdulaziz University list of founders.
  2. ^ Brief biography from The Sheltered Quarter.
  3. ^ Michael Wolfe, One Thousand Roads to Mecca (Grove Press, 1999: ISBN 0802135994), p. 441.