عارف الحسيني

When he was in first grade, his teacher asked the class: “What are the benefits of trees?”

All of his classmates started to answer: “food,” “wood,” “fruit,” “shade.” But then Aref raised his hand and said, “Trees are very beneficial because we can tie a rope between them to dry our laundry.” His teacher was very upset with this answer that she had never seen in her guidebook and decided to punish him for “disrespecting her and the class.” Soon enough, his mother was called to school and found herself trying to convince the teacher that Aref had not understood the question. The truth, however, was that the teacher hadn’t understood his answer.

This incident led Aref to believe in the importance of making a real change in the Palestinian formal educational system. Since then, he has been determined to change people’s conformity to one way of thinking.

Born into a modest family in 1979 in Jerusalem, Aref was the second child of a carpenter father and a tailor mother. Today, Aref Husseini, an electronics engineer, holds a master’s degree in applied physics and leads one of the most influential NGOs in Palestine. At home Aref is the musician of the family with an established talent in playing the oud. To the society he is an emerging modern novelist with the recent publication of his first novel, Saturday Infidel. Aref has worked in several industrial and educational fields as a developer, researcher, and innovator, and has registered three patents.

His childhood dream and longing for a sustained change in his community led him in 2003 to found Al Nayzak Organization for Supportive Education and Scientific Innovation. Al Nayzak became a leading Palestinian NGO in supporting scientific and technological innovation. The organisation stands strong as it celebrates its ten years of incubating thousands of scientifically talented students and providing them with academic, professional, and financial support to improve their capacities and entrepreneurial projects. Al Nayzak continues to provide its services through its three branches in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Gaza, and opens this summer the first Science and Technology House in the country as a step towards Aref’s and the organisation’s dream in establishing the first Palestinian science museum. Further, Al Nayzak has received several national and international prizes such as the Palestine International Prize for Excellence and Creativity and the Welfare Association’s NGO Achievement Award. In 2008, Aref himself was chosen as one of the top 22 Arab Social Innovators by the Synergos Foundation for founding Al Nayzak Organization.

Since 2009, while not drifting too far from his role in founding and managing Al Nayzak, Aref has been a volunteer member of the national team responsible for evaluating and developing the official Palestinian technology curriculum at the Palestinian Curricula Development Center - Ministry of Education and Higher Education. Today he heads the national team for authoring the new Palestinian Official Technology Curriculum. Moreover, due to his immense personal efforts and through the help of Al Nayzak, he and a group of Palestinian engineers established the Palestinian subsection of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-IEEE, where he was elected vice chairman.

Aref now waits impatiently for the opening of the Science and Technology House as well as prepares himself for the special signing event for his novel, Saturday Infidel, at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair in April 2013, as it joins the group of “most popular books in the Arab World.” The novel was nominated for the Arab Booker Award and is soon to be translated into English.

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