She received her doctorate from Cairo UniversityGada al-Samman is the author of several collections of poetry, 6 collections of short stories, 5 novels, and a number of books of journalistic and memoir nature. Gada al-Samman’s first book “Your Eyes are My Destiny” was published in 1962 in Beirut, and brought her fame in the literary circles of Syria and Lebanon. The true popularity (9 reprints) of this book came after Ghada herself became famous. In 1975, she published her masterpiece Beirut’75. – a novel that, “according to critics and readers, seemed to foreshadow the events of the Lebanon War of 1975-1990”.

A year later, she published Beirut’s Nightmares, a book about the horrors of the Civil War, which Ghada herself witnessed. By the 1980s, al-Samman was already considered one of the best contemporary writers in the Arab world, and by the 1990s her works began to appear in English and French translations.

Ghada al-Samman’s novel “Nightmares of Beirut” is about the events of the summer of 1976, when Lebanon was engulfed by a monstrous tornado of civil war. Written in the form of a diary, the novel with documentary veracity reproduces the details of the fratricidal conflict, inspired by spline imperialism and local reaction, reveals the social and class contradictions of Lebanese society, which for many years were hidden behind the respectable signboard “Mediterranean paradise.

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The novel presents an epic picture of the life of the people of the Sahara, the Great Desert, where ancient tales, wise sayings of distant ancestors, and the aspirations of the present-day people are intertwined, some of whom seek God, while others are obsessed with base passions and the eternal pursuit of gold and power. This is a book about attempts to regain the lost paradise through the creation of an earthly city of happiness.

Rarely has a work of fiction allowed us to delve so deeply into a foreign culture, to familiarize ourselves with myths and legends in such detail, to get in touch with the history of another people, as Ibrahim Al-Quni’s novel did. When we open it, we are not just transported to the heart of the Sahara, we are immersed in the details of life of the Tuaregs – proud riders of the desert, their slaves and blacks, their neighbors – Arabs and Berbers, and we begin to realize the correctness of someone’s remark about the incredible diversity of cultural and ethnic differences of the inhabitants of the Black Continent. Because I finally realized why my friend of student years so persistently corrected me when I called his Tuaregs (he studied at the Faculty of Oriental Studies) Arabs.

On the other hand, it is not for nothing that all the reviewers of this novel tell so little about the plot of the book – the plot here does not just recede into the background, it is so often swept away in the sand by the inexorably blowing winds that at times you have to spend a lot of effort to unearth its origins, to remember those characters whom the author left on the previous pages. And this is not a flaw of the novel, it is just a peculiarity of life in the desert, with which the reader has to come to terms. You can’t do otherwise in the desert, and you realize it quite quickly.

And then you stop being surprised by the fact that Tuareg men cover their faces and their women are not as submissive and obedient as it is customary in the rest of the Muslim world, by the fact that not only camels, but also scarabs, mountain sheep, stones and water speak to a real desert dweller…. That gold should be avoided and silver should be rejoiced in as a greeting from a distant mother moon, that to say aloud the name of an ibijji means to bring him a thousand steps closer to the herd…. I have learned so much about life in the desert that now I know I don’t belong there. I could be there only as a captive, and all the power of my spirit could not change the laws of the desert.

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History is cyclical. Including the history of humanity’s religious life. Prophets come and go, for a short time changing the usual way of life. Like gusts of wind periodically stirring the calm surface of a musty pond, prophets stirred the minds of the common people, but did not fundamentally change anything. In the long run. In the short run, yes, but only for one or two generations of street dwellers, and then their memory remained only in songs and legends. Yes, I’m talking about the book now, but, agree, there is something similar to the history of mankind in this.

Those in power and their repressive apparatus see prophets as a threat to their position and well-being, even when they do not openly attack their power, and aim to destroy the troublemakers or at least attract them to their service in order to continue to prosper. At the same time, they, the rulers, are clearly aware that they are hated by the common people, and the overseers, robbers and extortionists are their only support and protection. The Progenitor lives in reclusiveness in his Great House and has long since stopped showing his face in public. He has retired from business, but bequeathed (not the most appropriate word, but I can’t think of anything else) his property to all his descendants. But the only one who gets an income from it is the superintendent, who understandably shares his share with the overseers. And the rest of the residents of the street? Well, apparently, they have enough that they are envied by the inhabitants of other streets.

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