Khalil Mutran, the Poet of the Two Countries: Egypt and the Levant, his contemporaries do not mention him unless they overstate his generosity and gentleness of his creation, so where is he among the poets of his time?

Khalil Mutran was born in Baalbek and was at that time in Greater Syria. He studied Arabic in Beirut on Ibrahim Al Yazji, and moved to Paris, and from there to Alexandria, then Cairo, where he headed the editor of Al-Ahram newspaper, then he founded a magazine for two years, then the daily "Al-Jaweeb Al-Masrya" daily for 4 years Years.

But Mutran continued to compose poetry, and he was the third of three with Ahmad Shawqi and Hafez Ibrahim, and he had friendship with Hafez Omar, and together they translated a book on economics.

Mutran added to the Arabic Library translations of a number of Shakespeare's plays, which he translated from French.

A metropolitan excelled at drafting poetic representations, recounting Nero's story in hundreds of verses on a single rhyme.

In Egypt, Mutran witnessed the arbitrariness of the English occupier and the arrogance of the High Commissioner, Lord Cromer. And from the Levant came news of the French occupier. When the General Guru entered Damascus as an invader, he went to the tomb of Saladin and said his word documented by one of his comrades in arms: These are us, O Saladin!

Just a few years later, France bombed Damascus with a brutal bombardment, killing hundreds.

He was the Archbishop of the conscience of the Arabs. The poet of the two countries was next to the poet of the Nile, Hafez, and the prince of poets Shawky, and when they died, the critics called him "the poet of the Arab countries."

Khalil Mutran died in 1949, lived celibate and died alone, poor, and was buried in Cairo, but one would not find a grave for him, as he was buried in the charity cemeteries in a mass grave of dozens, according to the Egyptian writer Wadih Filastin, who participated in his funeral.

The story of civilization

A book of about 30,000 pages located in more than 40 chapters in the Arabic edition. The American William Durant began writing it in 1935 and completed it 40 years later. He wrote half of the volumes alone, then his wife Ariel shared the remaining half.

Durant wanted to write the cultural and civilizational history of the world, so his book was full of thousands of anecdotes and stories about scholars, art, literature and religion, and he and his wife traveled for months every year, so they did not write about a civilization until after they lived in its place.

The book was issued in English, and its parts were translated into Arabic in an up-to-date manner, and one would find in it a description of the Sumerian and Pharaonic civilizations and the civilizations of India, Greece and Europe, up to the era of Napoleon. Durant described Islamic civilization in about 400 pages.

The reader easily realizes that this book - despite its magnitude - was written with love, and perhaps the reason for this is that the couple lived a love story that lasted 60 years.

When Durant was hospitalized at the age of 96, his wife abstained from food and died. Their only daughter kept the news from her father, but he knew him from Al-Masaa newspaper, and he died two weeks after his wife.