Recent Stories

Lebanon Still Overshadowed by Oblivion As Port Blast Aftermath Enters Fourth Year
 
Art has played an influential role in making sense of the loss felt after the August 4 explosion. Tom Young’s “Strong Angels” and other paintings show a human dimension of the tragedy and its civilian heroes, who “join forces to lift the city’s grief,” writes Darine Houmani of Diffah Three (The New Arab). “Despite all its devastation, the August 4 explosion brought greater impetus to preserve our heritage and brought about a database of our historical buildings that hadn’t been done before,” states Mona Hallak, an architect, heritage activist, and director of the American University of Beirut’s Neighborhood Initiative, as cited in The New Arab. Several weighed in on the rebuilding efforts, including Lebanese architect Jad Tabet, who proposed “rehabilitation” rather than “reconstruction,” focusing on preserving the city’s existing social fabric and inhabitants alongside the architecture (for further reading on Jad Tabet and architectural heritage, see Al Jadid, Vol. 4, No, 25, Fall 1998; Vol. 5, No. 26, Winter 1999; and Vol. 24, No. 79, 2020). As art historian and gallery owner Andrée Sfeir-Semler says, “You need to nourish people with art and culture because that is what feeds their souls.”

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Our Current Issue

From Renaissance to the Digital Age:

How Translation Can Power Arabic’s Future
By Naomi Pham
 
The Arabic language, with all its vast, rich history, has frequently been a subject of concern among intellectuals and linguists throughout recent years. The language has experienced significant development over the past century and a half and remains one of the most widely spoken languages, the official language of over 20 countries, and used by over 400 million speakers. Despite this, articles emerge every other year worrying about its development.
Essays and Features

Not a Kafer, Just a Critic:

How Ziad Rahbani Challenged Religious and Political Orthodoxy with Wit, Sorrow, and Song
By Sami Asmar
 
On 26 July 2025, the Lebanese composer, pianist, playwright, and polemicist Ziad Rahbani passed away from cirrhosis of the liver in Beirut at the age of 69. Since he started composing as a teenager, the son of the legendary Fairuz (now 90 years old) and the late Assi Rahbani of the celebrated Rahbani Brothers, the musical prodigies who defined the shape of the modern Lebanese short song, Ziad leaves us a multi-decade-long legacy that reshaped Arab music and Lebanese politics. The genius and enigmatic Ziad will be remembered by his countless fans worldwide, but likely happily forgotten by the authorities he challenged and ridiculed. 
Essays and Features

Aftermath of the Mar Elias Church Bombing:

Abeer Dagher Esber on the ‘Sectarianization of Blood’ in Syria’s Long Continuum of Collapse
By Naomi Pham
 
The recent attacks on the Church of Mar Elias in Al-Dweilaa on June 22, 2025 during Divine Liturgy left at least 25 dead and 63 injured. Perhaps Syrians have become accustomed to hearing such tragedy in the news, for every month a new story of blood, violence, and climbing death tolls appears, the massacres on the Syrian coast still a fresh wound on top of the losses suffered in Al-Dweilaa. Abeer Dagher Esber’s impassioned response to the attacks in her essay, “A Prophet of Fire… Consumed by Our Zero-Sum Conflicts,”* is an unflinching criticism of Syria’s problems. The attack on the Church of Mar Elias is a "wound to the spiritual memory of Syria and to the symbolism of the saint whose name the church bears," she writes, adding, "It is a bloody irony that the place named after the ‘one who raised the dead’ should be blown up by someone who worships death, sees the Other as heresy, and life as merely a path toward a delusional glory."
Essays and Features

In Sickness and Silence: Arab Writers and Artists Between Pain and Power

By Elie Chalala
 
I grew up in Hazmièh, a small town east of Beirut, Lebanon's capital, during the early 1960s. Our rented apartment was situated near a modest multi-unit residential building, known as the Wadih El Safi building, named after the celebrated Lebanese singer who owned it. At the time, Wadih El Safi (1921-2013) was renowned for his wealth and fame, a reputation that endured after I immigrated to and settled in the United States. Wadih El Safi's later life is notable for his declaration of bankruptcy just a year before his death. He attributes his financial troubles to a monopoly contract he signed with Rotana, a Saudi Arabian record label and the music division of the Rotana Media Group.
Essays and Features

A Syrian Surgeon and Novelist Returns to a 'Country Once Called Syria'

Khalil al-Neimi Exposes What Tyranny Has Done to His Homeland
By Elie Chalala
 
I feel an affinity with Khalil al-Neimi, the author and novelist. Like him, I left my country, Lebanon, in 1972, and often thought about what I left behind. I gradually lost the desire to return, and later, after making a short visit back, I gave up on the idea altogether after being away for 38 years. Neimi and I differ on why it took us a long time to return (for me, 38 years, and for him, 50 years). It has been 53 years now since I departed Lebanon.
Essays and Features

The State of Arab Journalism: Emile Menhem’s Dynamic Blend of Text and Visual Aesthetics Modernizes the Arab Newsroom

By 
Naomi Pham
 
Graphic design played a significant role in the evolution of Arab newsprint. Arab graphic design historians locate this art’s roots deep in the region’s visual heritage, drawing from its history of calligraphy, geometric compositions, motifs, and colors. However, the field itself is relatively new, emerging as a discipline only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Graphic design now plays a widespread role in everyday life, whether in public architecture or the design of everyday items. 

Emile Menhem: Invigorating Arab Journalism Through Graphic Design
By Lara Balaa
Khatt Books, 2019

Jabbour Douaihy (1949-2021): His Literary Legacy a ‘Memory Lane’ of Lebanese Life

By 
Elie Chalala
 
Despite his battle against leukemia, Jabbour Douaihy's death at age 72 on July 23 came suddenly, a surprise to even some of his acquaintances. Douaihy wrote several novels throughout his life, and though he never intended this role, critics and friends regarded him as the narrator of Lebanese life. He wrote about aspects of Lebanese life that history books could only dream of capturing, detailing Lebanon throughout its various historical moments to its current state of dystopian ruin and collapse, a world seen vividly in his last novel, "Poison in the Air.”

Lebanese Government Brought to Reckoning on the Anniversary of Beirut Port Explosion

By 
Elie Chalala

Victims of the devastating Beirut port explosion have no answers or justice, even a full year after the disaster. According to Human Rights Watch, the August 2020 explosion at Beirut port’s hangar 12 decimated the significant sectors of the city, killing 218 people, injuring 7,000, and displacing 300,000. Despite protests from victims to find those responsible for the explosion, efforts to investigate have been thwarted repeatedly. Lebanon’s legal and political systems have allowed the officials responsible to avoid accountability, benefiting from a lack of judicial independence, immunity provided by existing laws, lack of respect for fair trial standards, and due process violations. As the Lebanese government continues to prove itself incapable of delivering justice, Human Rights Watch recently published a report covering evidence revealed in the 127-page report, “‘They Killed Us from the Inside’: An Investigation into the August 4 Beirut Blast” and calls for an international investigation.

Habermas vs. the Sheikh Zayed Book Award: An Intellectual or Soft Power Conflict!

By 
Michael Teague

Jürgen Habermas's decision to reject the Sheikh Zayed Book Award's "Cultural Personality of the Year" prize set off a heated debate in the Arab press. The most famous remaining representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt school, despite his considerable bibliography, Habermas was not well-known at the popular level in the Arab world. After his initial acceptance and then rejection of the Sheikh Zayed award, however, intellectuals in the employ of the United Arab Emirates criticized the German philosopher vociferously. 

Can a Nation Plagued by Mass Corruption, Decaying Institutions, and Rabid Sectarianism Deliver Justice For those Lost and Victimized by the August Explosion?

By 
Elie Chalala
 
One cannot miss the irony of the Lebanese officials allegedly responsible for what is possibly the third or fourth largest non-nuclear explosion in the world hiding behind “immunity” from a crime that claimed over 207 people and injured 6,000, while devastating large parts of the Lebanese capital. The Beirut Port explosion in August 2020 measured about one-twentieth the size of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb, according to the BBC. As its one-year anniversary approaches, many Lebanese are still struggling to hold accountable those responsible for the blast.

Important, Sometimes Controversial Iraqi Poet Saadi Youssef (1934 - 2021) Requests a ‘Funeral Without Mourners’

By 
Elie Chalala
 
The legendary and controversial Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef died at 87 in his Harefield home outside of London on June 12 from lung cancer. The poet, whose multitude of works encompassed poetry, prose, literary criticism, translation, and memoir, leaves decades’ worth of work penned in exile and translated into several languages, among them English, French, German, and Italian.

Controversy Over Mohammad Shukri’s Literary Legacy Outlives the Author

By 
Al Jadid Staff
Many students and scholars of Arabic literature would recall the debates on the books of Mohammad Shukri (1935-2003) late last century and a part of the early 21st century. The debates centered primarily on Shukri’s picaresque approach, which included harsh depictions of repression, marginalization, deprivation, morality, breaching taboos and censorship, and of course, the banning of his books in most Arab countries. We can categorize many of his books as autobiographical, and the opposition was not to this type of literature but to the language and details he used. His spontaneity violated all technical and artistic norms in both Moroccan and Arab literature, especially in “The Bare Bread,” “Age of Mistakes,” and “Faces,” his autobiographical trilogy.
 

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