"This is how he thought” revisits Mu’nis Al-Razzaz’s articles and questions on freedom and democracy
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Amman — The book Mu’nis Al-Razzaz’: "This Is How He Thought" has been published, bringing together a number of essays written by the late novelist and thinker Mu’nis Al-Razzaz and published in the newspapers Al-Dustour and Al-Rai between 1990 and 1993, presenting through them his vision on issues of freedom, democracy, dignity, and humanity, and his critical stance on the political and social transformations witnessed across the Arab world.اضافة اعلان
The book revisits part of Al-Razzaz's intellectual and journalistic journey, through essays that reveal his constant preoccupation with questions of reform and democracy, and the need to reassess Arab political experiences, moving away from the idea of the "inspired leader" and ready-made solutions, believing that change begins with dialogue, asking questions, and making room for disagreement.
Former Prime Minister and Munis’s brother, Dr. Omar Razzaz, wrote the book's introduction, in which he noted that compiling these essays was a trust that required honest editorial effort from Mounis's friends and colleagues in journalism, to produce this documented form worthy of him.
He added: "It's difficult for me to write about Mu’nis with complete objectivity; he wasn't just my older brother, but also my closest friend during many periods of my life, and someone who left a deep mark on my heart and on the way, I see many things. Mounis passed away, but his absence never became a distant memory."
Razzaz believes that before getting to know Mu’nis the essayist, one must first get to know Mu’nis the person during his formative years, and read these essays within their human, family, and historical contexts.
He said: "Mu’nis was ten years older than me, and we grew up in a household shared by Munif Al-Razzaz and Loma'a Bseiso; a small house in size, but one that buzzed with public concerns, political debate, and constant engagement with national and pan-Arab affairs." He added that their parents did not settle for theorizing, but were deeply, wholeheartedly involved in political and social public work. It was in this atmosphere that Mu’nis was shaped, and from an early age he began recording his thoughts and observations, trying to understand what was happening around him and find his place in a world that was changing violently and quickly.
Razzaz noted that Mu’nis studied philosophy at university and threw himself into party and union work with the passion of a young man who believed in change, and was elected president of the Jordanian Writers Association. But his fragile nerves, which were in truth an expression of an excessive sensitivity to falseness and cruelty, could not bear "politics" in its narrow sense, with all the bickering and opportunism it entails. So he chose to withdraw and submit his resignation, opting instead for what felt truer to him: devoting himself fully to writing.
He wrote his first collection of reflections at a young age, under a title that "captures a large part of his spirit": "Sticking Out the Small Tongue at the Big World," a title that reveals much of his personality, and that ever-present desire to provoke, question, and rebel against accepted truths. He then moved on to writing short stories and novels, and there he found a wider space for expression. His novels received notable attention on both the Jordanian and Arab levels, because they did not follow the paved road, but broke with traditional form and content in a strikingly bold way.
Razzaz dwells on one of Mu’nis's most prominent novels, The Labyrinth of the Bedouins in the Skyscrapers of Mirage, a title that condenses a complete vision before the first page is even turned. The "Bedouins" are not merely a historical image, but a metaphor for the Arabs' regression from a nation into warring tribes that lost their compass. The "labyrinth," meanwhile, is not incidental confusion, but a structural condition resulting from the absence of free will and a shared project.
As for the "skyscrapers of mirage," Razzaz sees them as symbolizing an imported, imposed civilization, one whose features the Arabs neither designed nor built with their own hands, leaving them as mere recipients on their own land, strangers in their own home.
Throughout this whole journey, Mu’nis would turn to painting whenever his pen fell short. When events shook him, whether uplifting or crushing, and when words failed him, or were failed by an internal or external censor, he would pick up his brush and red and black colors, and paint his bloody works, heavy with gallows, destruction, and displacement. But he never surrendered to despair and also painted the homeland as he wanted it to be: a blossoming green spring, and breathtaking nature pulsing with life despite everything.
Razzaz then turns to the essays included in the book, explaining that Mu’nis began writing and publishing them between 1990 and 1993. To understand what makes these essays different, one must first understand what Mu’nis was not. He was not a professional essayist in the traditional sense: neutral, sticking to figures, facts, dates, and sources, viewing events from a distance with the eye of an objective researcher. Rather, he wrote as he breathed: a continuous outpouring, springing from a wounded Arab person still searching for freedom, dignity, independence, and liberation.
Mu’nis was a voracious reader of history, philosophy, politics, and sociology, and of literature above all. But he was not academic in his approach, allowing himself to combine a bitter critique of Arab nationalist and socialist experiments, which had betrayed their own slogans, with a critique of Western capitalism, which marginalized human beings and applied a double standard, raising the banner of freedom and human rights, then confining it to the white man and leaving it, for the rest of the world, hollow and meaningless.
Razzaz continues that while Mu’nis, in his literary work, diagnosed the state of the "labyrinth" in which Arab people find themselves trapped, in his journalistic essays he was keen to put forward a different, complementary idea: the necessity of finding a way out of that labyrinth.
Mu’nis repeatedly called for a reassessment of bitter past experiences: from revolutions and coups that raised gleaming slogans, only to go on to eliminate their opponents through imprisonment, assassination, execution by hanging, dragging, and gunfire, to wars we lost one after another against our existential enemy, all the way to peace treaties that brought nothing but more killing and destruction.
Razzaz said: "Mu’nis did not believe in the idea of the inspired leader who arrives with magical solutions. He believed in democracy, not as a ready-made prescription, but as a difficult, long path, one that allows society to catch its breath, review its mistakes, and open space for dialogue and disagreement."
He expressed this belief in the democratic path when he wrote: "Catching our breath gives us a chance to reflect, reconsider, and review. And reconsideration requires discussion, and discussion requires parties with differing views, sitting around a round table, beginning to review our experiences without the tension or agitation that would drag us back into the same vicious cycle we started from."
Mu’nis was neither naively optimistic nor absolutely pessimistic. He saw the scale of the setback that had befallen the Arab reality and genuinely grieved over it, but he always kept a space open for hope. He would rejoice like a child whenever he saw our peoples express themselves freely and responsibly, and would suffer whenever he saw repression, chaos, or occupation advance at the expense of human beings.
In his essays, he never surrendered to the censorship that sometimes besieged the written word, striking out words, paragraphs, or entire articles. He was always searching for new ways to get around the red pen, and different means of getting his idea across to the reader. Among those means was the character "Kathir Al-Ghalaba" (roughly, "the Often-Defeated"), that imagined friend he would converse and argue with, using him to raise contentious and problematic issues.
And when the space for speech narrowed, he would return to drawing, sketching gagged mouths or faces trapped inside sealed jars, expressing in his own way the narrowness of the space available for disagreement and expression.
Razzaz said: "When my brother and friend Mohammad Al-Tal invited me to write an introduction for this book, I went back to reading Mounis's essays again, decades after I first read them. And I admit that return wasn't easy on a personal level, because it brought back Mounis's voice as I knew it, and also took me back to an entire chapter of our Arab history."
He added: "Those essays reminded me of the first Gulf War three decades ago, then the second Gulf War, and here we are today, having witnessed further wars and new crises. They reminded me of what happened and continues to happen in Palestine, of the growing number of fragile or failed Arab states, and of many of the questions that occupied Mu’nis throughout his life and remain open to this day."
Razzaz believes that the value of Mu’nis's essays did not lie in predicting the future, since that was never his aim to begin with, but in his continuous call for the Arab individual to be a partner in shaping his own future. He believed that change begins with a question, and that societies that stop questioning themselves lose their capacity to progress.
Mu’nis wrote in one of his essays: "We are not defeated when we lose the battle, but when we stop asking the question."
Razzaz believes this phrase captures much of Mu’nis's personality and intellectual project; his essays disturbed many readers, prompting them to reconsider many accepted truths, and pushing them to search for their own answers.
Perhaps this was, simply, the message Mu’nis wanted to leave us: to keep the door of questioning open, because the question is the beginning of knowledge, and the beginning of freedom as well.
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Aziza Ali
The book revisits part of Al-Razzaz's intellectual and journalistic journey, through essays that reveal his constant preoccupation with questions of reform and democracy, and the need to reassess Arab political experiences, moving away from the idea of the "inspired leader" and ready-made solutions, believing that change begins with dialogue, asking questions, and making room for disagreement.
Former Prime Minister and Munis’s brother, Dr. Omar Razzaz, wrote the book's introduction, in which he noted that compiling these essays was a trust that required honest editorial effort from Mounis's friends and colleagues in journalism, to produce this documented form worthy of him.
He added: "It's difficult for me to write about Mu’nis with complete objectivity; he wasn't just my older brother, but also my closest friend during many periods of my life, and someone who left a deep mark on my heart and on the way, I see many things. Mounis passed away, but his absence never became a distant memory."
Razzaz believes that before getting to know Mu’nis the essayist, one must first get to know Mu’nis the person during his formative years, and read these essays within their human, family, and historical contexts.
He said: "Mu’nis was ten years older than me, and we grew up in a household shared by Munif Al-Razzaz and Loma'a Bseiso; a small house in size, but one that buzzed with public concerns, political debate, and constant engagement with national and pan-Arab affairs." He added that their parents did not settle for theorizing, but were deeply, wholeheartedly involved in political and social public work. It was in this atmosphere that Mu’nis was shaped, and from an early age he began recording his thoughts and observations, trying to understand what was happening around him and find his place in a world that was changing violently and quickly.
Razzaz noted that Mu’nis studied philosophy at university and threw himself into party and union work with the passion of a young man who believed in change, and was elected president of the Jordanian Writers Association. But his fragile nerves, which were in truth an expression of an excessive sensitivity to falseness and cruelty, could not bear "politics" in its narrow sense, with all the bickering and opportunism it entails. So he chose to withdraw and submit his resignation, opting instead for what felt truer to him: devoting himself fully to writing.
He wrote his first collection of reflections at a young age, under a title that "captures a large part of his spirit": "Sticking Out the Small Tongue at the Big World," a title that reveals much of his personality, and that ever-present desire to provoke, question, and rebel against accepted truths. He then moved on to writing short stories and novels, and there he found a wider space for expression. His novels received notable attention on both the Jordanian and Arab levels, because they did not follow the paved road, but broke with traditional form and content in a strikingly bold way.
Razzaz dwells on one of Mu’nis's most prominent novels, The Labyrinth of the Bedouins in the Skyscrapers of Mirage, a title that condenses a complete vision before the first page is even turned. The "Bedouins" are not merely a historical image, but a metaphor for the Arabs' regression from a nation into warring tribes that lost their compass. The "labyrinth," meanwhile, is not incidental confusion, but a structural condition resulting from the absence of free will and a shared project.
As for the "skyscrapers of mirage," Razzaz sees them as symbolizing an imported, imposed civilization, one whose features the Arabs neither designed nor built with their own hands, leaving them as mere recipients on their own land, strangers in their own home.
Throughout this whole journey, Mu’nis would turn to painting whenever his pen fell short. When events shook him, whether uplifting or crushing, and when words failed him, or were failed by an internal or external censor, he would pick up his brush and red and black colors, and paint his bloody works, heavy with gallows, destruction, and displacement. But he never surrendered to despair and also painted the homeland as he wanted it to be: a blossoming green spring, and breathtaking nature pulsing with life despite everything.
Razzaz then turns to the essays included in the book, explaining that Mu’nis began writing and publishing them between 1990 and 1993. To understand what makes these essays different, one must first understand what Mu’nis was not. He was not a professional essayist in the traditional sense: neutral, sticking to figures, facts, dates, and sources, viewing events from a distance with the eye of an objective researcher. Rather, he wrote as he breathed: a continuous outpouring, springing from a wounded Arab person still searching for freedom, dignity, independence, and liberation.
Mu’nis was a voracious reader of history, philosophy, politics, and sociology, and of literature above all. But he was not academic in his approach, allowing himself to combine a bitter critique of Arab nationalist and socialist experiments, which had betrayed their own slogans, with a critique of Western capitalism, which marginalized human beings and applied a double standard, raising the banner of freedom and human rights, then confining it to the white man and leaving it, for the rest of the world, hollow and meaningless.
Razzaz continues that while Mu’nis, in his literary work, diagnosed the state of the "labyrinth" in which Arab people find themselves trapped, in his journalistic essays he was keen to put forward a different, complementary idea: the necessity of finding a way out of that labyrinth.
Mu’nis repeatedly called for a reassessment of bitter past experiences: from revolutions and coups that raised gleaming slogans, only to go on to eliminate their opponents through imprisonment, assassination, execution by hanging, dragging, and gunfire, to wars we lost one after another against our existential enemy, all the way to peace treaties that brought nothing but more killing and destruction.
Razzaz said: "Mu’nis did not believe in the idea of the inspired leader who arrives with magical solutions. He believed in democracy, not as a ready-made prescription, but as a difficult, long path, one that allows society to catch its breath, review its mistakes, and open space for dialogue and disagreement."
He expressed this belief in the democratic path when he wrote: "Catching our breath gives us a chance to reflect, reconsider, and review. And reconsideration requires discussion, and discussion requires parties with differing views, sitting around a round table, beginning to review our experiences without the tension or agitation that would drag us back into the same vicious cycle we started from."
Mu’nis was neither naively optimistic nor absolutely pessimistic. He saw the scale of the setback that had befallen the Arab reality and genuinely grieved over it, but he always kept a space open for hope. He would rejoice like a child whenever he saw our peoples express themselves freely and responsibly, and would suffer whenever he saw repression, chaos, or occupation advance at the expense of human beings.
In his essays, he never surrendered to the censorship that sometimes besieged the written word, striking out words, paragraphs, or entire articles. He was always searching for new ways to get around the red pen, and different means of getting his idea across to the reader. Among those means was the character "Kathir Al-Ghalaba" (roughly, "the Often-Defeated"), that imagined friend he would converse and argue with, using him to raise contentious and problematic issues.
And when the space for speech narrowed, he would return to drawing, sketching gagged mouths or faces trapped inside sealed jars, expressing in his own way the narrowness of the space available for disagreement and expression.
Razzaz said: "When my brother and friend Mohammad Al-Tal invited me to write an introduction for this book, I went back to reading Mounis's essays again, decades after I first read them. And I admit that return wasn't easy on a personal level, because it brought back Mounis's voice as I knew it, and also took me back to an entire chapter of our Arab history."
He added: "Those essays reminded me of the first Gulf War three decades ago, then the second Gulf War, and here we are today, having witnessed further wars and new crises. They reminded me of what happened and continues to happen in Palestine, of the growing number of fragile or failed Arab states, and of many of the questions that occupied Mu’nis throughout his life and remain open to this day."
Razzaz believes that the value of Mu’nis's essays did not lie in predicting the future, since that was never his aim to begin with, but in his continuous call for the Arab individual to be a partner in shaping his own future. He believed that change begins with a question, and that societies that stop questioning themselves lose their capacity to progress.
Mu’nis wrote in one of his essays: "We are not defeated when we lose the battle, but when we stop asking the question."
Razzaz believes this phrase captures much of Mu’nis's personality and intellectual project; his essays disturbed many readers, prompting them to reconsider many accepted truths, and pushing them to search for their own answers.
Perhaps this was, simply, the message Mu’nis wanted to leave us: to keep the door of questioning open, because the question is the beginning of knowledge, and the beginning of freedom as well.
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Aziza Ali