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Occupied Jerusalem -

The Director of the Center for Jerusalem Studies at Al-Quds University, Dr. Yousef Saeed Al-Natsheh, is proud to be a native of the Old City of occupied Jerusalem, where he spent his childhood and youth and still lives there.

Due to his intense attachment to his city, Natsheh says that he did not leave Jerusalem for a long time except to study in Egypt, from which he obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and Britain, from which he returned with a doctorate.

As part of a series of reports from Jerusalem about Jerusalemite figures who made their mark on the city in various political, economic, academic, cultural, scientific and other fields, Al Jazeera Net monitors the experience of Al-Natsheh, who worked for a long time as director of the Square and Antiquities Department in the city’s Islamic Endowments Department.

Our guest explains that he went from the beginning to study the heritage of the old city, especially the buildings and history of an ancient city that includes in its architectural fabric buildings that are rarely rivaled by other buildings at the level of the global architectural fabric.

He said that the ancient city's antiquity was an incentive for him to specialize in studying Islamic antiquities in relation to architectural buildings and Islamic arts.

He pointed out that he devoted his master's thesis to studying Islamic coins minted in Palestine since the Islamic conquest, and his doctoral thesis on architectural development and architectural buildings built by the Ottomans, which was later turned into an encyclopedia under the name "Ottoman Jerusalem, the Busy City."

Natsheh touched on a vital project that he supervised between 1982 and 1990, which was the restoration of an important group of Arab and Islamic buildings in Jerusalem.

He mentioned among his most prominent academic productions his book “The Architectural Heritage of Jerusalem, a Study of Its Development, Its Signs, and Its Architectural and Decorative Elements” and the book “Israeli Excavations: Its Objectives and Results.”

Natsheh concluded that Jerusalem, with its spiritual, human and social heritage, deserves all the attention of the people, lovers and lovers of Jerusalem, considering that “preserving Jerusalem is preserving the comprehensive Arab-Islamic and humanitarian heritage.”

Source: Al Jazeera