Getting established

Al-Qattan moved to Kuwait to work as a teacher at the start of its oil boom when foreign workers were pouring into the country to help deliver an ambitious public works programme. Here, he met his wife-to-be, Leila Al Migdadi, where she was also a teacher, and they married in 1952. 

Like her husband, Leila had also experienced significant upheaval due to geopolitical instability across the region. Born in Iraq, to where her father, esteemed educator Darwish Al-Miqdadi, had been exiled from Mandatory Palestine for refusing to salute the Union Jack, Leila and her family were forced to relocate multiple times; first to Iraq, then to Damascus and Beirut, before making a home in Kuwait (from where she would be later displaced during the first Iraq War).

A year after getting married, and now with a young family to support, Al-Qattan left his teaching position to join the Ministry of Water and Electricity in Kuwait, quickly working his way up through the ranks to become director general.

A decade later in 1963, he took another leap, leaving behind his safe ministry job and partnering with Kuwaiti businessman Hajj Khaled Al-Muttawa, to set up Al-Hani Construction and Trading Company.

Al-Qattan found himself navigating two distinct worlds. Although he had become a successful businessman in Kuwait, he was still deeply committed to preserving Palestinian culture and identity and fighting for the liberation of his homeland.

“This demanded principled courage and determination but also compromise,” writes one of his son’s Omar after his death. “How he came to identify and often skilfully marry these contradictions—progressive thinking vs conservative pragmatism, the fight for emancipation vs the love of tradition, the logic of political and social engagement vs that of business, hope vs despair—would characterise his life trajectory.”

Al-Qattan’s business, which is still operating today as the Al Hani Group and now chaired by Omar, is one of the most successful contracting companies in the Arab world. Some of its more notable projects include: the National Bank of Kuwait; Al Shaheed Park, Kuwait’s largest urban park; Bayan Palace Conference Hall; Kuwait Central Courts Complex; Kuwait International Airport; and Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Centre.

The Al-Qattan family’s contribution to the Kuwait and its economic development was rewarded with citizenship, giving them freedom of movement denied to many exiled Palestinians at this time.

It was at this time that Al-Qattan, now a wealthy and highly-respected businessman, started to support young Palestinians at home and abroad by providing funding and scholarships to help them further their education.

“The values I grew up with, which are rooted in Islam and other religions, are compassion and supporting the needy in one’s own society according to one’s means,” Al-Qattan said in an interview in 2011. He says his “first priority” was to help finance the education of his immediate relatives, children and then grandchildren, but later, he began to extend hisconcern to fellow Palestinians.

“My father was a very, very smart man. Really, really amazingly brilliant. And he had a vision,” recalls Najwa Al-Qattan, his eldest daughter, who says he would often talk proudly of his late father’s business acumen, despite being illiterate.

However, Najwa sees her father’s interest in education less about changing family narratives and more about uplifting wider Palestine. “My father really believed that education was only thing Palestinians – with no land or state - could truly own and he saw it as a way for people to make money and survive as families, as communities, as a nation.”

Najwa, who is an Associate Professor of Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern History at Loyola Marymount Universitywith a B.A. in Philosophy from the American University of Beirut, a M.A. in Philosophy from Georgetown University, and a Ph. D. in History from Harvard University, also benefited personally for her father’s passion for education.

“It didn’t matter that I was a girl,” she says. “He really supported me at a time when other wealthy families were not encouraging their girls to study. For him, my academic success was a Palestinian academic success. That’s how he saw it.”