Essays and Features

 

Arabic in the pre-Islamic era — or Jahiliyyah, the ‘age of ignorance’ — was a diverse continuum of spoken dialects and poetic language rather than a single unified language. The period encompasses the history of the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding regions prior to the spread of Islam in 610 CE, a time characterized by nomadic Bedouin tribes and a rich oral poetry tradition. Mustafa Attia Juma’s essay, “The Reality of Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Era,” explores the deep history of the Arabic language and the conditions that determined its purity.

 

Two languages, two sets of expectations — a twofold rejection on both sides, and at the heart of it, a complex relationship with identity. The Francophone writer perpetually exists between two worlds, regardless of efforts to bridge the distance between them. French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani’s recent book, “Assault on the Border” (Assaut contre la frontière, Gallimard, 2026) explores the predicament of Maghrebi identity fragmented by two languages — more specifically, the writer’s relationship to her language, Arabic, bound by a “yearning that can never be sated, for its object was not suddenly lost, but rather never fully formed in the first place,” writes Anisa Makhalda in Asharq al-Awsat. “Assault on the Border” provides an intimate look into the writer’s personal life and reservations, especially surrounding Slimani’s “profound loss of Arabic” as a Francophone writer who has lost touch with what she considers her “paternal language.”

 

Social media has become an invaluable resource to many facing displacement throughout Lebanon’s ongoing conflict. A senior UN official reported to Reuters that approximately 100,000 people are registered in shelters, but the number of displaced residents is expected to be higher, as many families are staying with relatives, in public areas, or on the streets. The estimated number of people displaced from Southern Lebanon, according to statistics reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on March 31, 2026, is over 1 million, with a large percentage unable to access food, shelter, or basic necessities. For many, this is not the first time they have had to flee, but their second or even third.

 

Though the crime fiction genre has seen a rise in popularity among Arab writers in recent years, Arab criticism continues to treat the detective novel as inferior in the hierarchy of literary genres. Tales surrounding murder and mystery in Arab literature can be traced back to some renowned works of Arab literature — from classics like “One Thousand and One Nights” to more contemporary works like “The Thief and the Dogs” by Naguib Mahfouz or Yasmina Khadra’s “Inspector Llob” series. Yet it is not uncommon to hear the detective novel described by intellectuals as not "serious" enough or incapable of attaining the stature of novels that grapple with "serious" themes like identity, history, defeat, exile, and tyranny. Other sources state the genre has been treated as youth literature, dismissed by critics. For this reason, the genre has been sidelined as literature for entertainment rather than professional literature.

 

Algerian writer Said Khatibi’s novel “Swimming Against the Tide” (Ughalib Majra al-Nahr, Dar Nofal, 2025) was named the winner of the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), otherwise known as the Arabic Booker. The novel competed against works by Egyptian novelist Ahmed Abdel-Latif, Algerian novelist Amin Zaoui, Egyptian author Doaa Ibrahim, Iraqi novelist and writer Diaa Jubaili, and Lebanese novelist and journalist Najwa Barakat. Khatibi’s prize-winning novel “Swimming Against the Tide” takes readers to his hometown of Bou-Saada, a small town in southern Algeria, in the early 1990s. Two narratives piece together a larger picture of Algeria on the cusp of the Black Decade (1992-2002), exploring prevailing cultural norms and the degrading reality women faced during that era. As Said Khatibi states in an interview with ArabLit, “In my novel, I am not concerned with recording or debating history; rather, I tell the story of how history affects individuals. I write about people on the margins, who were not heroes, yet who bore the consequences of broader historical events.”