Friends and colleagues of the late novelist and thinker Mounis al-Razzaz revisited his literary, intellectual and journalistic legacy at the launch of "This Is How Mounis al-Razzaz Thought," held earlier this week [date needs verification] at the Abdul Hamid Shoman Foundation. The event offered a window into al-Razzaz's reading of Arab political and social realities, his firm positions on the region's transformations, and a more personal portrait of the man and his relationships with friends and colleagues.
اضافة اعلان
Speakers at the event, including former Prime Minister Dr. Omar al-Razzaz, journalist Mohammad Kharroub, critic Fakhri Saleh, novelist Yahya al-Qaisi and journalist Mahmoud Mounir, said al-Razzaz's newspaper columns went beyond chronicling daily events. Drawing on his literary and intellectual background, they said, his writing created space for reading, analysis and critique, probing the causes, meanings and broader context behind events rather than simply recording them.
Participants at the event, moderated by Attallah al-Tarawneh, examined al-Razzaz's journalistic career and its ties to his wider literary project, pointing to the irony, criticism and reflection running through his columns and his ability to approach political and social issues in the Arab world from a perspective that reached beyond the moment. His brother, Omar al-Razzaz, recalled milestones in Mounis's life and intellectual development, saying his absence had never faded into a distant memory.
Al-Razzaz thanked the participants, describing them as Mounis's friends and lifelong companions. He said the book brings together a collection of Mounis al-Razzaz's columns published during the 1990s in the newspapers Al-Dustour and Al-Rai, writing that reflects the voice of a man who never simply observed reality but engaged with it directly.
He added that compiling the columns was a responsibility that demanded honest editorial effort from Mounis's friends and colleagues in journalism, work that produced a documented volume worthy of his legacy.
"It's difficult for me to write about Mounis with complete objectivity," al-Razzaz said. "He wasn't just my older brother. For many periods of my life he was also my closest friend, someone who left a deep mark on my thinking and on how I see many things. Mounis is gone, but his absence has never become a distant memory."
He explained that understanding Mounis the columnist requires first understanding Mounis the person, shaped by his family history and personal formation, and that his columns should be read within that context.
Mounis was ten years older, al-Razzaz said, and the two grew up in a household shared by their parents, Munif al-Razzaz and Lamaa Bseiso. It was a small home in size but one filled with public concerns, political debate and constant engagement in national and pan-Arab affairs. Their parents did not stop at theorizing, he added. Both were deeply involved in political and social activism.
Mounis was shaped by that environment, al-Razzaz said, and began recording his thoughts and observations early in life, working to translate what he saw and experienced into writing that expressed his view of people, society and the world around him.
Al-Razzaz said Mounis wrote his first collection of reflections while still young, under a title that captured his entire spirit: "Sticking Out the Small Tongue at the Big World." The title, he said, revealed much about his brother's character: a persistent urge to provoke, question and rebel against accepted truths. Mounis later moved into short fiction and the novel, where he found a wider space for expression. His novels drew notable attention across Jordan and the Arab world for their boldness, breaking from convention in both form and content.
Journalist Mahmoud Mounir said few Jordanian or Arab novelists expressed their ideas as clearly as Mounis did, even though he chose to present them through fragmented, scattered narrative structures, particularly in his first three novels: "Alive in the Dead Sea," "Confessions of a Silencer" and "The Bedouins' Maze in the Mirage's Towers." Mounir noted that the central character in "Alive in the Dead Sea," a man shaped by Arab nationalist thought, ends up in a psychiatric hospital, while a Marxist protagonist is killed by nationalists, and another Marxist character lives out his illness and alienation because he never moves from theorizing to action.
Mounir added that Mounis directed his criticism at a range of characters across his novels, whether those who clung to reverence for the past or those who searched for future visions, none of whom managed to change their reality. He sided, by contrast, with the figure of the resistance fighter against occupation, even one lacking the ideas needed to bring about real change.
Critic Fakhri Saleh said Mounis al-Razzaz was not, at his core, a professional journalist or a political writer, and that his journalism, including his daily column in Al-Dustour and later Al-Rai, could not be described as a full commitment to the profession. Like many Arab writers and creative figures, Saleh said, he remained close to the world of journalism without ever devoting himself entirely to literary work, whether fiction, the novel or translation.
Saleh said this is the case for many Arab intellectuals and writers, since committing fully to writing remains risky and rarely provides a stable living. He noted that Mounis, like other Arab writers, worked especially during the last two decades of his life as a columnist on political, social and cultural affairs, seeking to place daily events, wars, conflicts and Arab political and social problems within a framework of reading, analysis and reflection, searching for a comprehensive interpretation of the troubles facing contemporary Arabs.
He explained that this intellectual outlook, paired with a deep engagement with the implicit meanings behind political or social events, set Mounis apart from fellow columnists who chase headlines and often settle for describing events or offering a single interpretation.
Saleh added that Mounis's intellectual, cultural and literary background pulled him away from chasing the news cycle and toward digging into its underlying causes and context. That approach, he said, gave the columns he published over two decades in the Jordanian magazine Al-Ufuq and the newspapers Al-Dustour and Al-Rai a distinct quality, lasting relevance and the capacity to illuminate the present just as they once illuminated his own era.
Novelist Yahya al-Qaisi said that although Mounis al-Razzaz, like many sensitive writers, experienced bouts of depression that he partly disclosed in confessional writings published during his lifetime, he resisted them personally through laughter, jokes and irony, which al-Qaisi said may have helped him maintain his daily balance.
Al-Qaisi noted that Mounis was neither withdrawn from life and work nor removed from public affairs. He wrote his political columns regularly, served as editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Afkar, and worked as an adviser to the minister of culture, alongside daily meetings with friends and with the many writers, journalists and politicians who visited the ministry, figures who varied widely in intellectual outlook, temperament and, at times, disposition.
He pointed to the bitter irony running through several of Mounis's columns, citing a piece titled "A Deformed Mentality," written in response to some Arab activists' reaction to Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiry's killing of the activist Abdel Khaleq Mahjoub. In that column, Mounis wrote: "This logic stirs nothing in me but tearful laughter and black humor."
Journalist Mohammad Kharroub, in his remarks, recounted his friendship with the late Mounis al-Razzaz, recalling several moments when Mounis expressed optimism about political developments, an outlook that came through clearly in his writing.
Kharroub said Mounis's words, in some of those moments, "seemed to leap off the page dancing, elated and joyful," celebrating early signs of a return to democracy in several Arab countries whenever a statement or decision from some capital announced the restoration of party politics and guaranteed political parties' activity, rights, freedoms and the protection of their members.
These moments, according to Kharroub, reveal a side of Mounis's optimistic character, one that seized on any sign, however limited, of a possible return to democratic and multiparty life in the Arab world.
