Born in Jerusalem, Issa J. Boullata was a Palestinian writer, scholar, and translator who taught Arabic studies at Hartford Seminary, Connecticut, before moving to Montreal, where he taught graduate courses in Arabic literature, Modern Arab Thought, and Qur’anic Studies at McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies. The author of several books on Arabic literature and on the Qur’an, he was a noted translator of Arabic literature and twice won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. He died in 2019 at the age of 90.