ABSTRACT
Wasfi al-Tall was born in 1919 and grew up in Irbid in northern Jordan. The family has its origins in the Bani Zaydan tribe which migrated from the Najd region in Arabia to Syria in the middle of the eighteenth century. Some members of the tribe settled in the Irbid area while others chose the area of Zabdani in south-western Syria. Wasfi al-Tall was the son of Mustafa Wahbi al-Tall, a well-known Jordanian poet who had not always been favourably disposed towards the Hashimite regime. Wasfi's mother was a Kurdish woman whom his father had married during a sojourn in ´Arabkir. In late 1942, the tides of war in the Middle East began to change in favour of the Allies. The anti-British and pro-German mood that had prevailed in much of the Arab world in the early years of the Second World War was beginning to subside.
