Honesty is Honored in Selection of Judge Tarek Bittar as Lebanon’s Person of the Year

By Elie Chalala

Swallowed by crisis after crisis, Lebanon has struggled to stand beneath an economic meltdown, the Beirut Port explosion in 2020, and the worsening pandemic under a government that has failed to serve its people. With mounting fears that the country will continue to sink into despair, the people of Lebanon are in dire need of hope. Hope, as it turns out, comes in the form of one judge’s determined pursuit of the perpetrators of the August port explosion. In December, the Arabic online journal Daraj, along with other columnists, named judge Tarek Bittar the “Person of the Year” to wide public approval, marking the first time Lebanon has selected an individual for the achievement.

Essays and Features

About the Artist: Tom Young

By Naomi Pham
Throughout the past decade, British artist Tom Young’s work has captured Lebanon on the cusp of globalization and change. His contributions in safeguarding Beirut’s traditional architecture equally breathe life into the personal histories of the city’s residents. Young has lived in Beirut for the past 15 years in the neighborhood of Gemmayzeh, known for its hundreds of years old, beautiful historic buildings. Gemmayzeh was among the hardest hit by the devastating explosion of Beirut’s port on August 4th last year, a tragedy that killed hundreds, injured thousands, and left ruin in its wake. One may recall Young’s painting, “Toxic Beirut” (2020), featured on the cover of Al Jadid Vol. 24, No. 79, which was painted on September 11 when a fire broke out at the site of the port explosion. “All of us in Beirut were (and still are) scared that another disaster could happen at any time. Painting it is a way of harnessing that fear, transforming it into something meaningful, and perhaps, beautiful,” he told Al Jadid.
 
“We Want the Truth” (2021) appears on this issue’s cover. Depicting a crowd of people waving Lebanese flags, Young illustrates the gathering that took place on the one-year anniversary of the explosion. The people still have no answers, and those responsible are yet to be held accountable. In the words of Young: “People were demoralized and broken, helpless in the face of such injustice, corruption and brutality...as the country descended further into a state of collapse...no one knew what to do or how to change anything.”
Art

Sabah Fakhri: Loss of the Last Giant

By Sami Asmar
On 2 November 2021, the world lost a legendary singer at the age of 88 years. A Syrian who sang specifically the repertoire of his hometown of Aleppo and became popular worldwide in a rare occurrence due to his exceptional talent, charisma, perseverance, and specialization in a genre suiting his tenor voice and cultural background. 
 
Born Sabahudine (or Sabah al-Din) Abu Qaws in 1933, when he committed to a career in the arts as a teenager, his family and teachers felt Abu Qaws did not have a musical ring to it. In honor of Fakhri al-Barudi, a Syrian national figure who also founded the conservatory of Damascus and was one of his earliest sponsors, he adopted the stage name Sabah Fakhri.
Essays and Features

Arab Publishing Industry Drowning in Tsunami of Economic, Social Crises

By Naomi Pham with Elie Chalala
There is an old saying: Cairo writes, Beirut prints, and Baghdad reads. Books have played essential roles in the Arab world’s intellectual scene, and bookshops in Syria and Lebanon flourished in the 1960s and 70s. However, readers’ relationships with books have changed in modern times; scholars and intellectuals no longer flock to bookstores as they did in the past. Instead, book publishing worldwide — particularly their physical print and sale — appear to be a dying trade in the digital age.
 
Essays and Features

Founded in Egypt by Lebanese Immigrants, Legendary Al Ahram Newspaper Marks 145th Anniversary

By Elie Chalala and Naomi Pham

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Lebanese and Syrian immigrants took the Arab journalistic world by storm, leaving numerous literary and cultural achievements in their wake. These immigrants established newspapers and professional literary publications of renown. Overseas, some two dozen Arabic-language newspapers sprung in the United States alone, headed by writers like Ilya Abu Maadi, Mikhail Naimy, and Amin Rihani. In the Arab world, two Lebanese Christian brothers landed on the shores of Egypt and established one of the most prominent household publications in Egypt — Al Ahram Newspaper.

Essays and Features

Diaspora Arab Women Writers: The Legacy of Shahrazad and Female Infanticide

By 
Nada Ramadan Elnahla

Rather than focus on Arab women’s repression from an observer’s viewpoint, Hanadi al-Samman’s “Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings” (Syracuse University Press) instead highlights the accounts of female writers living in diaspora who have contributed productively and creatively through their writings.

Rima Assaf: How One Broadcaster Liberated Her Emotions with the Written Word

By 
Rima Assaf

While preparing my report on the Holocaust of Aleppo, I felt the customary format of broadcast news did not allow me to express my feelings. Thus, I have resorted to these written words in order to release my unbearable pain after watching a father breaking and clawing at stones with his bare hands in search of his children, entombed under mountains of rubbles.

While preparing my report on the Holocaust of Aleppo, I felt the customary format of broadcast news did not allow me to express my feelings. Thus, I have resorted to these written words in order to release my unbearable pain after watching a father breaking and clawing at stones with his bare hands in search of his children, entombed under mountains of rubbles.

Through these words I repeat those of a wounded child in Al Sukari suburb hospital as she cried out: “Mother, help me! May God support and comfort you. My heart hurts me.”

Aleppo: A Catastrophe Defying Poets’ Powers of Description

By 
Amjad Nasser

When talking about what is happening in Syria, I face the inability of language to express reality. My vocabulary remains limited. My ability to describe reality, the basic forms of literature and writing, remains limited.  Nothing I have written or read could be elevated to the level of one moment of the reality experienced by Syrians in their disastrous country, or in their great Diaspora into which they were unmercifully pushed.

 

When talking about what is happening in Syria, I face the inability of language to express reality. My vocabulary remains limited. My ability to describe reality, the basic forms of literature and writing, remains limited.  Nothing I have written or read could be elevated to the level of one moment of the reality experienced by Syrians in their disastrous country, or in their great Diaspora into which they were unmercifully pushed.

Broken Dreams: Love, Corruption, and the Plight of Foreign Workers in Israel

By 
By Lynne Rogers
 
"...although a Palestine mystery, “Murder Under the Bridge” presents readers with a crime that exposes the harsh plight of illegal foreign female workers in Israel and the corruption that leads to their abuse."
 
Murder Under the Bridge, a Palestine Mystery
By Kate Jessica Raphael
She Writes Press, 2015
 
Kate Jessica Raphael describes her novel, “Murder Under the Bridge, a Palestine Mystery,” as “the product of my imagination and experience – the experience and imagination of a white, Jewish American who spent around eighteen months in Palestine, with brief forays into Israel.” Her cast of characters also crosses the green line in the pursuit of love, which results in grave consequences. The mystery opens with the discovery of t

The Syrian War Has Taken Us Prematurely to Hell!

By 
Father George Massouh

The crimes committed in Syria have surpassed what the human mind can imagine in terms of horrors and atrocities. Undoubtedly, in our cruel East, we have become accustomed to living with this reality, which plunges us down to the depths of hell. This horror lies in our acceptance of what occurs in our countries while we continue our daily lives as if nothing is happening, and justify the violence as a defense of central causes or as wars against terrorism.

 

The crimes committed in Syria have surpassed what the human mind can imagine in terms of horrors and atrocities. Undoubtedly, in our cruel East, we have become accustomed to living with this reality, which plunges us down to the depths of hell. This horror lies in our acceptance of what occurs in our countries while we continue our daily lives as if nothing is happening, and justify the violence as a defense of central causes or as wars against terrorism. As if some want to convince us that terrorism can be defeated by “counter” terrorism.

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