The Language That Precedes You
There is a particular experience that belongs, I think, to those who write in Arabic. It is the experience of inheriting a language that is older and larger than you are — a language that was already ancient when much of the modern world was being invented, and that carries within it layers of meaning, usage, and history that no single writer could ever fully know.
To write in Arabic is to write in the presence of the Quran, even if you are not writing about religion. The classical literary Arabic — al-fusha — in which most serious literature is composed is the same Arabic in which the divine text was revealed. This creates a relationship to language that is unlike the relationship English writers have to Shakespeare, or French writers to Racine. It is something more intimate and more pressurizing.
The Double Life of Diglossia
Arabic speakers live a double linguistic life. The formal written language and the spoken dialects — Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Moroccan, and dozens of others — are distinct enough that a novelist must make constant, conscious choices. Do I write dialogue in formal Arabic, which no one actually speaks? In dialect, which only some readers will recognize? In a deliberately constructed middle register?
These are not merely technical choices. They are political and cultural ones. Dialect writing has long been associated with authenticity, with the voice of ordinary people, with a certain democratic impulse. Classical Arabic carries the weight of the literary tradition, of education, of pan-Arab identity. A writer navigating this tension is, knowingly or not, making a statement about who Arabic literature is for.
What Arabic Does to Thought
Languages shape thought — this is debated among linguists but feels unmistakably true to those who write in more than one. Arabic is a root-based language: most words derive from three-letter roots that carry a core meaning, and different patterns applied to that root produce a family of related words. The root k-t-b, for instance, generates kitaab (book), kaatib (writer), maktaba (library), maktub (written, and also: destined).
That last word is telling. Maktub — "it is written" — is used in Arabic to mean fate, destiny, what is determined. Writing and destiny share a root. This is not a coincidence; it is the sediment of a civilization's way of thinking about language, about the relationship between words and reality. When I write in Arabic, I am writing inside that relationship, whether I intend to or not.
The Question of Audience
To write in Arabic today is to write for a fragmented audience. The Arab world stretches from Morocco to the Gulf, encompasses hundreds of millions of people, dozens of national contexts, and vastly different reading cultures. A novel published in Beirut will be received differently in Cairo, in Riyadh, in Rabat. Censorship operates differently in each country. What can be said, and where, and by whom — these are never abstract questions.
And yet the dream of a unified Arab literary space persists. The book fairs — Sharjah, Cairo, Beirut — gather readers and writers across borders with an enthusiasm that resists political fracture. Arabic literature continues to find its audience, and that audience continues to grow.
Why I Keep Writing in It
Someone once asked me why I continue to write in Arabic when translation into other languages might reach more readers more easily. The question confused me. You do not choose the language you dream in. You do not choose the language in which your grief becomes specific enough to bear. Arabic is not a strategy. It is the substance of my thinking, the home my ideas return to after wandering.
To write in it is not a limitation. It is the condition of everything I know how to say.