Younis Bahri
Younis Saleh Bahri al-Jubouri (c. 1903 – 1979; Arabic: يونس بحري) was an Iraqi journalist, broadcaster, and writer. He traveled to numerous countries and for this reason was called the Iraqi traveler in his time. He is said to have mastered over 17 languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Personal life
Bahri was born around 1903 in Mosul. His first marriage was with a woman named Madiha in Mosul. Yunus Bahri is said to have married more than 100 women,[1] however, much about the life of Bahri is uncertain because many myths exist about him. In 1923, he started his global tour where he visited Asia, North America, Western Europe and later North Africa.
In 1929, he met Julie van der Veen, a female Dutch painter, in a casino in the French city of Nice. He wanted to marry her, but she did not want to travel much and wanted to settle. He left and traveled and met Julie again in 1939. He then had an affair with her for more than ten years, exchanging love letters in English until they later married in Berlin at the end of 1939.[2] Their marriage ended after less than four months and Julie returned to The Netherlands.
He had more than one hundred children, and this was mentioned to one of his companions in the Council attended by King Faisal I when the king congratulated him on the birth of his sixtieth son.[3] The number of marriages exceeded anyone else's, and one of the journalists asked Bahri at the end of his life: "How did you marry so many women, you are a Muslim, and Islam does not allow more than four wives?" Bahri said: "I divorced my wives after every marriage for a month, a year or more...".[4]
Career
Radio Qasr al-Zuhur and the killing of King Ghazi
In 1933, he returned to Iraq and issued a newspaper called the Al-Aqab Newspaper, and in that period he worked as a broadcaster on Radio Qasr al-Zuhoor, which was founded by King Ghazi and is an Arabic radio. He was the first to introduce King Ghazi from Radio Qasr al-Zuhur, and his voice was that which expresses opinions and ideas for/to King Ghazi, and between 1935 and 1939 Bahri did not go outside Iraq much except for his visit to 'Asir Region in southern Saudi Arabia and his attendance of a conference in Tunisia in 1937, as well as his participation in Iraq in a swimming race, and it is said that he participated in the race without training, so the result was his victory and his winning of first place. Bahri entered Al-Sahafa Square in Iraq when he issued the Al-Aqab newspaper, and in April 1939, the day the King Ghazi’s car collided with an electrical pole which led to his death, Al-Aqab newspaper was published and its first page was blacked out, and its title was in bold at the top of the page: "The death of King Ghazi". The published article caused noisy demonstrations throughout Iraq, and as a result of these demonstrations, the demonstrators attacked the British consulate in Mosul, and when the British consul George Evelyn Arthur Cheyne Monck-Mason came out, he was killed by a number of the attackers. When the police officers went to Bahri to arrest him and bring him to trial, he had arrived in Berlin in a Lufthansa plane carrying a passport issued to him by the German embassy in Baghdad, as the German consul in Baghdad helped him escape to Germany.
The reason for his arrest was attributed to the authorities because he indicated in the article published in his newspaper that there was hidden English influence behind the accident, to get rid of the king, who was calling for the elimination of colonialism. It was King Ghazi who founded a radio in the Royal Palace of Flowers calling for national unity, while speaking anti-English rhetoric, and Bahri was the first broadcaster on this radio.
Berlin Arab Radio
During the Second World War, he traveled to Berlin and met with the Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels and Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party's view, and there was an anchor work that read comments and analyzed on the Berlin Arab radio Station, with the updated Moroccan scholar Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali, and the fighter Fawzi al-Qutb, and he started his speeches with a sentence (Arab District), and what was broadcast on the radio in 1956 in Beirut was printed in a book called ("Huna Berlin", meaning "Here Berlin"), in several parts. During his work on the radio, he was promoting Nazi propaganda and hostile rhetoric to Britain and its allies. He became one of the people close to the German leadership, attending official ceremonies in the Nazi German military uniform, wearing the swastika on his forearm, which allowed him to meet many of the Nazi symbols, including the leader Adolf Hitler and the Italian fascist leader Mussolini.
In order to attract Arab listeners to the Berlin Radio Station, Younes Bahri asked Goebbels to agree to broadcast verses from the Qur’an at the beginning of the radio broadcast, and Goebbels hesitated but conveyed the proposal to Hitler, who agreed to it after Yunus explained to him that broadcasting the verses of the Qur’an at the opening would attract the attention of Arab listeners to Berlin Radio, and would leave listening to the British Radio (BBC), which was not broadcasting the Quran, so Radio Berlin gained the attention of the Muslim audience and became a favorite among the Arabs, and after a while Britain sensed this, so Radio BBC started broadcasting verses from the Holy Qur’an also, Yunus Bahri said in his notes on this radio: "Until recently, that phrase did not seem strange to the ears, as it remained in the minds and memories of the Arabs, despite the collapse of the Third Reich and the defeat of Germany, the Arab neighborhood was the voice of Younis Bahri, through the Arab radio station that he founded in Berlin, and which he says: "Here is Berlin Hay Al-Arab a greeting for Arabs, with this resounding phrase, I opened Arabic Radio from the German Radio Station in Berlin, at seven o'clock in the evening on April 7, 1939, which is three days after I left Baghdad, and the Arab Radio that I supervised alone and took over the radio on my own". However, after the Nazi defeat in WWII, he went to France, where he offered his services to form an alliance with the Muslim World,[5][6] then went back to the Middle East and settled in Egypt in 1956, when he started criticizing monarchies, following the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Upon that, he was recalled to Iraq by Nuri al-Said to acquire a new radio station, but he was arrested after the 14 July Revolution in 1958, but was later released in 1959 by Abd al-Karim Qasim. He then started to criticize Qasim, hence he left to Lebanon, then returned after the Ramadan Revolution in 1963.
During his residence in Europe, he worked as an imam and preacher in a number of mosques of European countries, and Professor Samir Abdullah Al-Sayegh commenting on Younis Bahri’s work on German radio says: "We know that he worked on Berlin Radio and came out of it by a decision from Haj Amin Al-Husseini after he was the main factor in its success and acquired on the ears of the Arab listeners everywhere, Al-Husseini decided to take it out because he did not adhere to the texts of the statements and comments that were prepared by the Arab office in Jerusalem, as he was agitated and added harsh, unwritten phrases in the text, and was related to 'Abd al-Ilah, most of his insults, as well as Nuri al-Said and Abdullah I of Jordan".
Death
At the end of his life, he stayed in Baghdad where he died in 1979, at the home of his relative and colleague Nizar Mohammed Zaki (director of the office of the News Agency in Beirut). He was buried by the municipality in al-Ghazali cemetery.
The French Press Agency and Reuters reported the news of his death, published by the Lebanese daily An-Nahar on its front page.
