Muhammad al-Ali

Muhammad Abdullah al-Ali was born in 1932 in the village of Al-Imran in Al-Ahsa, in eastern Arabia. Raised by his father, he learned the basics of reading and writing in the kuttab schools of his home town and memorised the Quran.

As a young man he travelled with his father to Najaf in Iraq to study the religious sciences. He completed intermediate and secondary school in Iraq and then entered the Faculty of Jurisprudence at the University of Baghdad, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1962. The years in Iraq exposed him to the literary ferment of Baghdad and Najaf, including the free verse movement that was transforming Arabic poetry.

Al-Ali returned to Al-Ahsa in 1964. In 1965 he became a teacher at a secondary school in Dammam, where he taught for three years before joining the education administration of the Eastern Province. In total he spent about nineteen years working in education. From 1986 until 1993 he served as an educational supervisor with the Royal Commission for Jubail.

Alongside teaching he built a career in journalism. He was editor in chief of the newspaper Al-Yaum for two years and wrote its column Kalimat Ma'iya (Water Words). Articles he published in Al-Yaum between 1978 and 2000 were later collected as Concerns of Light. He also wrote the cultural column Wuqufan Biha for Al-Yamamah magazine for many years.

His books include Water Words (2008), the poetry collection No Water in the Water (2009), Concerns of Light (2011), Lesson of the Sea (2012), The Growth of Concepts: Questions and Opinions on Existence and Values (2013), The Impossible Well: Attempts to Transcend the Prevailing in Culture and Society (2013), Olympic Rings: Essays on Enlightenment and Modernity (2013) and No One Is at Home (2015). In 2019 he lectured in Dammam on alienation and its contemporary forms.

Al-Ali was widely known by the honorific Abu Adel, after his eldest son. He lived for many years in the Eastern Province, between Al-Ahsa and Dammam. He was the father of four sons, Adel, Riyadh, Ali and Hadi, and four daughters, Shatha, Huda, Maha and Nada.

Muhammad al-Ali died on the evening of Tuesday 27 October 2026, aged about 94. No cause of death was made public. His funeral and burial took place on the afternoon of Wednesday 28 October 2026 at the Martyrs' cemetery in the town of Al-Jish in Qatif governorate, with his family to announce arrangements for receiving condolences. Saudi newspapers including Okaz marked his death as the loss of one of the defining figures of the country's modern cultural scene.

Al-Ali is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernism in Saudi poetry and one of the founders of cultural criticism in the kingdom. Moving between classical forms and the free verse poem, he brought philosophical questions about existence, language and society into Saudi literature, and his essays influenced several generations of writers.

His standing was recognised in 2015, when the Saudi Arabian Society for Culture and Arts in Dammam named the first edition of its House of Poetry festival after him and published the tribute volume Tilka al-Zurqa allati Allamatna al-Anashid (That Blueness Which Taught Us Songs). In 2022 he won the Prince Abdullah Al-Faisal International Prize for Arabic Poetry, in its fourth season, in the poetic experience branch.