Istanbul -

“Loving the simple, poor and oppressed people, extending a helping hand to them, and fighting colonialism with intelligence, wisdom and courage, is the summary of what Lawyer Hajar was, who defended the innocent inside and outside the court.”

This is how the Syrian writer and novelist Mahmoud Omar Khaiti described the heroine of his third and final novel in the "Levantine Trilogy" series, entitled "My name is Hajar... for Damascus, for my father."

The novel brings its reader back to life in Syria in 1922 through a poetic and prose embodiment that presents chapters from the life of lawyer Hajar Husam al-Shahid al-Hasani, a Syrian poet, writer and translator whose father is the hero of the Levantine trilogy tales, born to a Syrian father and a Palestinian mother.

Hajar was born in Jerusalem in 1876 and died in Damascus in 1959. She was known for her struggle against the French colonization of Syria and for her charitable, social and humanitarian activities, as if in her "almost real" biography - as the author of the novel describes it - a sacred link between the episodes of history and the spaces of geography in the Levant.

The novel shows many aspects of wisdom, courage and will in Hajar's personality and behavior. She is an old girl - as Khaiti says about her - she was 46 years old when the novel was written about her. She is also a gentle poet and writer of stories, and is concerned with writing for children in particular.

Hajar's bold articles in the Damascene newspapers, in which she addressed the public and explained to him the reality of colonialism and its exploitation of the homeland, continued to worry the French Mandate administration in Damascus.

According to Khaiti, Hajar paid the price for her words and faced great troubles, including arrest, torture and persecution, but she was patient and continued her struggle and national work, leading a group of girls and women through an association that she established to advance women, educate the illiterate and help the poor.

Consequences in Jerusalem

The novel - which has 113,000 words, and is the longest in the trilogy - goes on to explain the role of Hajar, her struggle, and her fight against French colonialism before she responds to the order of her elderly mother, who insists in the last chapters of the novel on visiting the grave of the father, Dr. Hossam near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, so the mother and her daughter travel to Jerusalem on the train.

In Jerusalem, Hajar began a new path of struggle when the author of the novel assigned her the task of searching for her father's killer and the method of killing him.

As it was in the case of the French mandate in the Levant, the British colonialism in Palestine began Hagar, who began to be threatened by a secret gang that ended with an attempt to assassinate her at the hands of an unknown killer in Jerusalem.

After the death of her mother, who grieved her and deepened her wounds after she was assassinated, as well as after receiving a letter from her friend in Damascus;

Hajar decided to return to the Levant to continue her struggle against French colonialism, to help her friend, to support the weak and the innocent, and to help her lawyer professor in the thorny cases in the courts.

The Levantine Trilogy

Hajar landed again in Damascus in chapter 42, with which the novel concluded, after it took two years to write it, and Khiti says that during them he tried to build the link between the past, the present and the future, in which readers play the role of true heroes after the author’s role ended and the publication of the novel that was signed in the exhibition Sixth International Arab Book Organization in Istanbul.

Khiti told Al Jazeera Net that the Levantine Trilogy 3 historical, social, and police novels recounting the biography of a Damascene doctor, the father of the mother, who lived in the 19th century and died in the early twentieth century. In his writing of his biography, he lists important life details for himself, his family, friends and society.

In the series, the Syrian novelist portrayed the details related to the father of Hussam, the martyr officer, and his virtuous Jerusalem mother, to his children and grandchildren, with a large space in the three novels devoted to depicting the great humanitarian works carried out by Dr. Hussam Sami, the martyr al-Hasani, the hero of the first trilogy, and after him his daughter Hajar, who walked On the path of her father, and like him, I encountered a lot of suffering.

This trilogy attempts to present a detailed narrative biography of Dr. Hossam and his daughter Hajar, two large families, many friends and enemies, the good and the bad. It introduces readers to the conditions of Damascus, Jerusalem, Beirut, Jaffa and many of the Levant, in addition to introducing Astana (Istanbul), Malta and Paris in that era that we are most ignorant of. from what we know.

Khiti says that the series, consisting of 3 large novels, constitutes a total of about 293,000 words in the style of autobiography, or memoirs of daily incidents, and depicts the smallest details of time, place, feelings, colors and struggles between good and evil.

Ammar Abdel-Khaleq, owner of Itqan Publishing and Distribution House, which published the novel "My Name is Hajar" (Al-Jazeera)

As for Ammar Abdel-Khaleq, owner of Al-Itqan Publishing and Distribution House in Istanbul, which published the series, he pointed out that the value of the novel and the series lies in the fact that it sheds light on a period of time whose details were absent from the children of the contemporary generation, explaining that the novel documents in a literary way the stage of the end of the era of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the occupation eras in Levant.

Abdel-Khaleq described to Al-Jazeera Net the Arab youth's demand in Turkey to read the series and the novel whose second edition was released as more than good, explaining that the Arab cultural and literary movement is receiving a strong return from Arab youth readers after years of estrangement.