to continue his studies in Damascus. Instead his father kept him in Irbid to work in the private school which he founded, the Ottoman Salihhya School. On 20 June 1917, Tal and his friend Mohammad Subhi Abu Ghnaimeh headed to the capital of the Empire, Istanbul, for a visit. On the way, they passed by an area in Turkey named Arapgir where Tal's uncle and his friend's brother lived. Instead of heading to Istanbul, he stayed there and in 1918 he began working for the Eskişehir magazine. He became bored after five months of working at the magazine and resigned in March 1919. He returned to Irbid in April. He spent the summer there and convinced his father to send him back to the Anbur School in Damascus to complete his high school education. In 1919, he published a joke in the Damascene Brotherhood Magazine owned by Jubran Masuh: Both Tal and Masuh were arrested for this joke. Masuh later understood that Tal's joke was mocking Ali Rikabi, the Military Governor of Arab Kingdom of Syria, which was established in the Levant following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire toward the end of World War I. In another episode of Tal's rebellious and stubborn temperament, he and the students at Anbur demanded the school principal provide them with military training to fight the French authorities in Syria. The principal told them that those who wanted the military should go volunteer and those who wanted science should stay in the school. Tal told him that he wanted to make the school a military training camp to which his principal replied: "You want it a military training camp with a cigarette in your mouth?" Tal then threw the cigarette so forcefully that it burnt the tip of the principal's pants. Before graduating, Tal participated in another strike that ended up with his expulsion to Aleppo with his friend Abu Ghnaimeh. During Tal's time in Aleppo he mastered Turkish and learnt some Persian. Al-Oudat stated that it was during his stay in Aleppo that Tal read the Rubaiyat of Persian poet Omar Khayyam and translated Apre La Bataille from French. Tal gained his high school degree from the Aleppo Preparation School. The Arab Syrian Kingdom was toppled by the French in 1920 and an Emirate over Transjordan was then established in early 1921 by the Hashemite Emir Abdullah of the Hejaz as a