Essays and Features

 

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.”