The Tragedy of Mustafa al-Hallaj

Mustafa al-Hallaj is not an artist—a tragedy, he is. His prints were stages for his carefully carved black-and-white mythologies to unfold. To al-Hallaj, mythology was neither a mere subject nor a sheer influence; they were lived, embodied experiences. His life was a tragedy, and he understood it as such.

At ten, al-Hallaj was sentenced to nomadism as his village, Salama, near Jaffa, was razed to the ground in 1948. With his family, he began a year-long trek for refuge, threading their way through the streets and quarters of al-Lydd, Ramallah, Damascus, and Beirut before pitching their tent in one of Cairo’s poor neighborhoods.

With its artifacts, sculptures, and monuments, Cairo overwhelmed the young refugee. This impact led him, years later, to enroll in the Cairo Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpture. In 1968, al-Hallaj joined Luxor Atelier and earned his master’s degree. While in Luxor, he made a life-changing decision, later reflected upon in an interview with artist and art historian Samia Halaby: “I was in Luxor thinking—sitting, in fact, in the lap of Amenhotep III—when I heard the song of the West Bank on radio, and I felt suddenly that my umbilical was tied to the Sidr tree in Salam[a].”[1]

At this point, al-Hallaj decided to leave Egypt and Join the Palestinian art movement under the aegis of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Moving to Damascus and then Beirut, he embraced his nomadism in hopes of returning to the homeland he was coerced to leave in 1948. Conscious of his inability as a wanderer to tend to his sculptures, al-Hallaj walked in the footsteps of Jochebed, Moses’s mother, and entrusted the Nile with his sculptures. “It was my wanderings that led me to [woodblock] carving. Sculpture requires institutions, stability, and land, and I have none… Sculpture is not suitable for the displaced artist, I think.”[2]

In the 1982 Lebanon War, under heavy bombing, al-Hallaj had to flee again to Damascus, leaving Beirut and his studio behind. During the war, al-Hallaj fought a lost battle for his own works—an oeuvre of some twenty-five thousand prints. While he succeeded in saving some woodblocks, this awe of loss drove him into harboring grief—A decade of melancholy and artistic silence.

When al-Hallaj rekindled his creative flame, he set out on an extremely ambitious work—a horizontal piece stretching over 100 meters in width and barely 30 centimeters in height. In 2002, while hard at work on his masterpiece, an accidental fire swept through his studio. Al-Hallaj could have escaped but chose not to. He walked into the flames to save his masterwork. The poet of black and white and the patriarch of Palestinian artists, as he is often referred to, could not take another loss. As a tragic protagonist, he understood his life for what it was—a tragedy—perishing in a final struggle against loss.


Discover more as part of On This Land : On This Land opened on November 19th, 2023 at Alserkal Avenue’s Concrete. Born as a triangulated response, the exhibition was spirited to life in just 3 weeks, building on years of research and informed dialogue on Palestinian art and culture by The Palestinian Museum and the Barjeel Art Foundation, with the curatorial support of Alserkal Arts Foundation.

[1] Samia Halaby, Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (Ramallah and New York: H.T.T.B. Publications, 2001), 22.

[2] Ahmad Bazoun, “Al-Fannān at-Tashkīly al-Filasṭīny Muṣṭafā al-Ḥallāj: Arṣum Bi-Rūḥ at-Ṭifl Wa-Alʿab Fī Farāgh al-Lawḥah Ḥattā al-Mutʿah [Palestinian Plastic Artist Mustafa Al-Hallaj: I Draw with the Spirit of a Child and Play in the Woodblock’s Void until Ecstasy],” Assafir, March 5, 1994, sec. Culture, 14.