A Syrian poet, novelist, and Islamic thinker, he was displaced from his country in the 1980s because of his political stances, and lived in exile in Jordan for more than four decades.
Abdullah Issa Al-Salama has been writing poetry since his youth, and his two poems, “O nightingale, we are brothers,” and “Leave my hands, I am not one of your prisoners,” which he wrote in the seventies of the twentieth century, became famous until they became among the most prominent songs sung by Islamic singers. He also wrote short stories and novels, and for that he won many awards in the Arab world.
He engaged in public work and was politically active within the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. He was arrested because of that, and then emigrated from his country to escape security prosecution. His political orientations and philosophy were reflected in many of the articles and visions he wrote. He was a philosophical thinker as well as a literary poet.
He passed away on Friday, June 12, 2026, in the Jordanian capital, Amman, at the age of 82. He was mourned by many writers, thinkers, and politicians in the Arab world.
Birth and upbringing
Abdullah Issa Al-Salama (Abu Yasser) was born in 1944, in the village of Al-Hadidi, affiliated with the city of Manbij (the city of Al-Bahturi) in the Syrian governorate of Aleppo. His father, Hajj Issa, was the village mukhtar in the 1960s and composed Nabataean poetry, and this is not surprising in Manbij, the city of poets.
Abdullah is the third of his ten brothers. He has six male brothers and three female sisters.
Study and training
Abdullah studied primary school in his village, then completed his education in the city of Aleppo, where he studied preparatory school at Seif al-Dawla School, then moved to Hanano High School, then Al-Raed Al-Arabi High School, before obtaining a high school diploma in literature from the Arab Islamic Institute in 1963.
After graduating from high school, he joined the Arabic Language Department at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Damascus, from where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968. The following year, he prepared a thesis on “War Poetry in Andalusian Literature” to submit to the Lebanese University to obtain a master’s degree, but he was unable to travel to discuss it.
He studied at the University of Damascus from many of its prominent scholars, including the grammarian Professor Saeed Al-Afghani, from whom he studied grammar and morphology, the investigating professor, Ahmed Ratib Al-Nafakh, from whom he studied pre-Islamic literature, Professor Mazen Al-Mubarak, a member of the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus, from whom he studied philology, Professor Muhammad Adeeb Al-Saleh, editor-in-chief of the “Civilization of Islam” magazine, from whom he learned the sciences of Hadith, Professor Muhammad Saeed Ramadan Al-Bouti, from whom he learned the sciences of the Qur’an, and many others.
In the arena of life
Abdullah Issa Al-Salama belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and held several positions in it. He was a member of its leadership, its Shura Council, and its political office. He also had contributions in writing studies and political visions in it.
The regime of President Hafez al-Assad arrested him in 1973 because of his political stances. He entered Al-Halbouni prison in Damascus as part of a wave of arrests that included many Islamists in Syria. When he was in prison, he heard the news of the death of the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Hudaybi, and he eulogized him with a poem titled Mishaal Azza.
Al-Salama left Syria after he was persecuted there for political reasons as part of the widespread political arrests he witnessed in the country in the early 1980s. He settled in Jordan, and from there he again enrolled in studies at Beirut Arab University, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in law in 1988.
After graduating, Abdullah Al-Salama worked as a teacher in schools in the city of Aleppo and its countryside between 1968 and 1979. He then left Syria in the 1980s and worked as a teacher at the Islamic Community College in the city of Zarqa, Jordan, between 1983 and 1987.
His literary life
Abdullah Issa Al-Salama wrote in many literary arts. He wrote poetry, short stories and novels, as well as many research and articles in literature, politics, thought and philosophy.
The poet Yahya Al-Hajj Yahya reports that the critic Haider Al-Ghadir used to describe Abdullah Al-Salama as “the poet of the era,” while Al-Hajj Yahya describes him as “clear in ambiguity, meaning that his poetry cannot be understood by any reader to understand its meanings or the accuracy of its depiction.” Perhaps this is due to the fact that Salama’s poems were characterized by philosophical depth, delving into the depths of the soul, touching on special meanings in it, or asking scathing questions that moved it to discover its hidden meanings, in addition to the intellectual, political, and social meanings it contained. This can be seen from the titles with which his collections were published, such as: The Shadow and the Heat, An Oasis in the Labyrinth, and Warts on the Samaritan’s Forehead.
Two of his poems, which he included in his collection “Oasis in the Labyrinth” (1985), became famous. They were sung by the Syrian vocalist Muhammad Munther Sarmini (Abu al-Jawd) in his seventh cassette published in the 1970s, and then many of the pioneers of the Islamic anthem sang them after him and with their melodies. One of them is his poem “Me and the Nightingale,” in which he speaks to the songbird:
O bulbul, we are brothers…but I, my brother, are different
You live to sing, and I… drink patience and regurgitate humiliation
Your pink heart is a charming melody… and my heart contains fire and smoke
And if he disappeared in the depths of the earth… our bodies, and time passed us by
You have become a memory, or dust, or an echo…or a breeze wafting through paradise
And your righteous brother is in his shrouds… chewing pain time after time
The second is his poem “Birth,” in which the radiance of the pure soul shines upon life, so he addresses it with dignity and dignity and exalts it with a heavenly exaltation that places the levels of the soul above the levels of matter, whatever they may be:
Leave my hands, I am not one of your captives.. O life, I have risen above you
Let my hands have my cosmic sperm…to play with some of your sperm with their tails
Leave my hands, for my longing is vast.. It crawls and extends within its range as yours
I am sublime, even the imagination fails me and the rational person is tired of my awareness
If I crawl on your wealth, then this is my destiny, and if I make my mistakes, your mistakes
If I seep into time, I am in it like light in wires
The heart of existence is me and the flowers of its fields… and its fragrance exudes from my pure fragrance
My thighs are as long as I have scattered my hands…and beware, then beware of your thorns
Al-Salam lived through the pain of his nation, and this was reflected in his poetry and literature. An example of this is his poem “The Epic of the Martyr Muhammad al-Durra,” in which he lamented the Palestinian child whose tragedy and Israel’s crime against him was captured by cameras, but it did not move the world to his rescue. So he combined many rhymes and diverse seas in it, and moved between vertical poetry and meter poetry, to tell that crime and that betrayal. It is the poem that the Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation in Kuwait honored in 2001 with the award. The second in the Competition of the Diwan of the Martyr Muhammad al-Durra, including his saying:
As much as you have destined, the Eraser has not erased you.. No way, you are the soul for souls
You are the witness, the martyr, and a witness… who tells what is on the horizon to those on the horizon
You are all innocence, the least of which is that you fly above the clouds, without a wing
They betrayed, as they do, for fear that their corruption would be mixed with righteousness
**
Hear the chorus raving, O Muhammad:
Stop… bullets
Die.. a shell
Their butcher went on without retribution
The missile launcher took over, proud and singing
He spread his palms to the wind with a reassured heart
**
Come back to us, Muhammad
Do not count a bloody body, or a sighing heart
You are in our hearts a memory of fire and sorrow
Every morning and evening you glow
Come back to us..
Not to what remained of you in our gaze, from what we saw
A flow of love, a breeze of calm, a light of diffusion
Just as Salama’s poetry was distinguished, his prose was also distinguished, and his story “Where is the Secret” won the fourth place award from the Taif Literary Club in 2001. His stories – whether short or the novel of which he published three – mostly dealt with political or social issues, with templates that were not devoid of humor in style, with intelligence in idea and treatment. This includes his story, “Why does the butcher lie?!” Which came in the form of a dialogue between two children, to reveal the corruption that afflicts political systems, or “The Story of Imam Al-Jursafi,” which shed light in a funny way on the oppression that people experience under oppressive regimes.
Al-Salamah devoted his literature to exposing injustice and exposing tyrants, which he dedicated in his novel “Al-Tha’aabini,” which tells the story of an arrogant ruler of an imaginary country, and exposes his methods and practices. Therefore, we see him saying in his dialogue with Muhammad Salem Saadallah, published in the League of Levant Writers: “My first concern is to shed strong, revealing lights on the injustice that the Arab person suffers at the hands of his rulers, their agents, their followers, and all those in power in their various positions. This is because of what I see and feel of the daily suffering of the Arab citizen, between the ocean and the Gulf, at the hands of these tyrants.”
From his writings
- Shadow and heat (Diwan-1975)
- An oasis in the wilderness (Diwan-1977)
- Warts on Samaritan’s forehead (Diwan-1985)
- Excuses (Diwan-1992)
- Lightning waves (Diwan-2001)
- The snakes (Novel-1985)
- The crying cloud (Novel-1991)
- The secret of the stray (Novel-1999)
- Who killed the mysterious man? (Novel-2003)
- Meeting line (Collected short stories – 1988)
- Why does the butcher lie? (Short story collection – 1992)
- Bitter tears (Short story collection – 1999)
Awards won
- Okaz Award For Hair (2009)
- Second prize in A competition that brings together Poets Without BordersFrom his poem “The Ship of Dhad” (2008)
- Second place from Al Babtain Foundation Award For poetic creativity, in the Martyr Muhammad al-Durra Competition (2001). He was supposed to receive the award from the Syrian ambassador, according to the award’s traditions, but the ambassador of the Assad regime refused to participate in honoring him, so the ambassador of the Kingdom of Jordan came forward instead and handed him the award.
- Ranked fourth in Taif Club Award Literary work for the story, about his story “Where is the Secret?” (2001)
His death
The writer and thinker Abdullah Issa Al-Salama (Abu Yasser) died at dawn on Friday, June 12, 2026, in exile in the Jordanian capital, Amman, at the age of 82. Many literary associations and institutions mourned him, as did the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, praising his intellectual and advocacy role.
The Syrian Ministry of Culture also extended its condolences and sympathy to the family of the deceased and his lovers, and to the Syrian and Arab cultural family, asking God to cover him with His vast mercy, and to reward him with the best reward for the literary and intellectual contributions he provided.
