Imran Abdullah

Sixteen years ago, on January 24, 2004, the Saudi novelist, Abd al-Rahman Munif, who was considered one of the most important Arab writers and novelists in the twentieth century, died, and he dubbed Brawe the contemporary Arabian peninsula, knowing that his Saudi passport was withdrawn in 1963.

Munif worked as a journalist and economist and fought political activity in Iraq, before he was expelled following the signing of the "Baghdad Pact" in 1955, and he was hostile to the Arab monarchy and the Republic alike after the 1967 defeat, a period after which he transformed to practice politics in another way, by writing Literary.

Munif became famous for his quintet "Salt Cities", which deals with pictures of life in the Arabian Peninsula with the beginning of the discovery of oil and the rapid transformations that changed the cities and villages of the island, including the refusal of the population to explore for oil and the use of power for violence, the transformation of the desert into an oil field, and the struggles of the ruling family in the Arabian Peninsula , Monitoring the conditions of people, changing habits, places, forms of belonging and identity.

Munif said that he meant "cities of salt", cities that arose in a moment of time exceptionally abnormal, meaning that "they did not appear as a result of a long historical accumulation that led to its rise, growth and expansion, but rather is a type of eruption as a result of emergency wealth; this wealth ( Oil) led to the creation of enlarged cities that became like balloons that could explode, to end, as soon as something sharp touched them. "

Island historian
In his talk to Al-Jazeera Net, the Syrian literary critic and novelist Haitham Hussein started his talk about Munif as "the social historian of the Arabian Peninsula" who wrote the details of its sharp historical changes and turns, which crystallized the personality of the people of the region and played a role in shaping their destinies.

He added that Munif won the spirit of the place and its authenticity against the invading of strange values ​​under the masks of change. He continued, "Munif was not present in the cities of salt, nor was Moran (an imagined state that witnessed the coup of Fener in his brother's account of the groove) according to him the eternal dream, but rather the spirit that was They yearn for it, and he was aware of the enormity of the catastrophe of the land and human beings.

Hussein mentioned that the cities that were formulated by the novelist Munif, whether Moran or Amoriya or "the land of blackness" (the title of the trip to Munif dealing with Iraq) or other places in the eastern or southern Mediterranean, were - although they were chasing their children and pressing them - they keep that hidden hope Among the folds of despair, that Munif was keen to dismantle his blades, in the hope that the people of these places, now or in the future, will be able to enjoy their beauty and grandeur on a desirable day.

Hussein considered that every Arab city has a share of Munif, and it has a presence and history, as it belonged to all Arab capitals, present in it. He wrote about Amman, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and others, in addition to his many places in the Arabian Peninsula, he wrote about exile, alienation, and loss, and was loyal to the greatness of writing as an issue and a weapon to challenge tyranny, as it embodied the charming affiliations in his personality and writing.

Politics and literature
Munif has written 11 novels, including: "Five Cities of Salt" and the trilogy "The Land of Black", and his novels - which mix historical documentation with literary fiction - have been translated into many foreign languages.

Munif - who was born in the Jordanian capital Amman in 1933 to a Saudi father from Najd and an Iraqi mother - moved between many capitals, and studied law in Baghdad, from which he was expelled to continue his studies and graduated from Cairo University, before moving to the former Yugoslavia in a scholarship supported by the Baath Party, He received his doctorate in oil economics from the University of Belgrade in 1961.

Munif presented a history to the unknowns that no one wrote about, and revealed the grievances of the Arab authorities, and began to address the effects of oil on society in his novel "The Long Distance Race", which recounts the rise and fall of the Mossadegh government in Iran and the conflict between the British and American colonial powers over Iranian oil.

Writing is a struggle
Munif is known for his adoption of the left-Arab direction, and Haitham Hussein says that his writings were based on concerns that have been the focus of his life, so writing was "the instrument of his human struggle."

Munif practiced party activity during his joining the Arab Socialist Baath Party, which was a member of his national leadership, before ending his political and organizational relationship with him in the early sixties.

Munif returned to Iraq in 1975, and then left for France in the early eighties to devote himself to writing and avoid the Iraq-Iran war, which he saw as a "war without war without justification," and was opposed to the regime of former President Saddam Hussein and the American occupation of Iraq alike.

Munif expressed "the disappointment of the Arab after the setbacks he experienced in certain historical situations," according to Hussein, for example, his novels "Trees and the Assassination of Marzouq" and "When We Left the Bridge" and "The Long Distance Race" express the bitterness of disappointment in different meanings in screenshots and details of them, and they appear Evident in that disappointment that settles a person and feels that he is defeating defeats throughout his history and life, and that he must search for ways to salvation.

The literary critic, founder of the Arabic novel site, believes that writing was a great weapon to expose tyranny and spread a kind of hope in the hearts of those who became the inmates of deadly despair.

Therefore, Munif searched for building a person because he is more important than palaces, and he is the one who can build cities and rebel against the concept of building walls before building a person, so his accounts document this originality that would contribute to building a person spiritually, not to keep it a hollow structure in cities Artifact is like a luxury camp.

Hussein concluded his speech by saying that Abd al-Rahman Munif consolidated the structure of the Arabic novel, and each of his works possessed a document, whether historical or social, the audacity of confrontation and adventure.