Yasir Arafat was born Muhammad 'Abd Ar-Ra'uf Al-Qudwah Al-Husayni on August 24, 1929 in Cairo, Egypt, to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother. He was raised in Cairo but always considered himself Palestinian. In the late 1940s, while a student in Egypt, he became an ardent Arab nationalist and adopted the name Yasir, after Yasir al Birah, a...