Jean Said Makdisi (Arabic: جين سعيد مقدسي) (born 1940) is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing.
[1] Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine, to a Palestinian family.
The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England.
[2] She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi.
Makdisi documented the city's decline in her first book, Beirut Fragments: a war memoir (1989): Today, the Beiruti's eye is constantly confronted by buildings in various stages of collapse; broken glass and torn awnings; dangling and broken electric signs: that once glittered in advertising gaudiness; shabby, dirty, overcrowded streets; blocks full of refugees, their children playing in the piles of rubbish scattered here and there, monuments to the war; telephone and electric lines hanging loosely from bent poles; stray dogs and cats, diseased and slow, sniffing at the garbage on empty corners.