Tewfik Mishlawi, who has died aged 76, was a father-figure and guru to at least three generations of journalists who went to the Middle East. They live in eternal gratitude to him and his daily digest of translation from the local and regional Arabic press and his analytical explorations of what was going on.
The digest, which arrived at the offices, hotels, missions and homes of journalists, diplomats, arms salesmen and other strolling players, was with us every day by about 10am. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the digest was named the Arab World. Later, during the mid-1970s and the torments of civil war, it became the Middle East Reporter, and that is how it has stayed.
Mishlawi and his colleague Ihsan Hijazi ran it from various perches in West Beirut and never failed, through 15 years of turbulence – not to mention two Israeli invasions – to bring their sheet out. The organ survived a Syrian mandate in Lebanon that ran from 1977 to 2005 and an Israeli occupation of Lebanon's south (where Mishlawi's family had been rudely dumped when Israel was created in 1948) that lasted from 1978 to 2000.
Mishlawi and Hijazi were both Palestinians. Mishlawi was born in Haifa, Hijazi in Jaffa, which makes it even more extraordinary how deadpan they were as they transmitted the ipsissima verba of the Arab press. Even when Mishlawi did analysis, explanation and background, there was never spin. These two reporters sent dispatches to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Daily Express. In an age when everyone had something to say, Mishlawi and Hijazi had a lot to report but let everyone else do the talking.
Mishlawi met his beautiful and dauntless wife, Phillipa Fraser-Orr, at the foreign desk of the Express, in 1976, and in the past years, as illness and misfortune took its toll on her husband, she became the backbone of the organisation. She kept his and the digest's spirits up – always taking on young people, teaching them how to write, be accurate and on time, and easing them into the Middle East.
Tewfik is survived by Phillipa and their son, Nadim, and by Rima and Rami, the children from his previous marriage, to Mahfusa.
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