In the study of book titles (titology), it is said: “Whenever we wonder how to speak about books, titles rush to save us.” Yet here I do not rush to the title of this book—The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness: Cultural Criticism on Unstable Frontiers by Hossam al-Din Muhammad—as a savior, but because it imposes itself and tempts us to speak about it.
اضافة اعلان
It is difficult to analyze and interpret this title without invoking Abu al-Alaa al-Maʿarri’s The Epistle of Forgiveness (d. 449 AH), for we are clearly facing a heritage-laden allusion that the title openly draws upon and cleverly invests in. The Epistle of Forgiveness is a unique prose work in Arabic heritage, combining imaginative narrative, literary and linguistic criticism, and philosophical reflection. Written as a response to Ibn al-Qarih’s letter, it transcended its occasion to wander through an imagined otherworldly journey across Paradise and Hell, revealing an early awareness of imagination as a tool of epistemic critique rather than mere entertainment.
In that journey, al-Maʿarri summons a notable array of poets—such as the Muʿallaqat poets, Labid, and al-Aʿsha—linguists like al-Farahidi and al-Asmaʿi, grammarians such as Sibawayh and al-Kisaʾi, theologians like Abu al-Hudhayl al-ʿAllaf and Abu al-Husayn al-Basri, as well as figures from the Prophet’s family, the Companions, caliphs, and men of power. Through the reports and debates he presents, he tests the justice of human judgments, reflects on ethical values and the authority of language in producing meaning, employing linguistic paradoxes, stylistic play, and a deep, almost muted irony—saying the unsayable while exposing the fragility of human understanding without ending in a denial of religious faith.
In The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness, we are also before a journey—but one that is neither imagined, nor satirical, nor ironic. It is a journey through the worlds of diverse figures, classical and contemporary: Arab and Western poets, writers, philosophers, and thinkers. Along the way, the book teems with incisive juxtapositions and stimulating comparisons: al-Mutanabbi and Ibn Haniʾ al-Andalusi; Firas al-Sawwah and Fatima Mernissi; Christ and Che Guevara; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Bertrand Russell; Foucault and Deleuze; Mahmoud Darwish and Salim Barakat; Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sayyid Qutb; Mao and Hitler; and many others.
The title The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness signals an ethical interrogation that is non-reconciliatory, rejecting symbolic compromises and opposing a culture of justification and gratuitous tolerance. It refuses to cross the line at which forgiveness turns from virtue into laxity and indulgence—perfectly in tune with the subtitle: Cultural Criticism on Unstable Frontiers. These frontiers are violence, power, evil, cultural complicity, intellectual falsification, and moral deviation—zones where the easy discourse of forgiveness does not work.
Thus, there is no forgiveness for Adonis when he deifies himself, or when he wages battles of deconstruction, critique, and accountability against the thought of one sect on the pretext that it is “imitative,” while turning a blind eye to another sect equally in need of deconstruction, critique, and accountability on the pretext that its thought is “creative.” Nor is there leniency toward writers Bou Ali Yassin and Nabil Suleiman in their thesis Literature and Ideology, where they deployed a finished, self-sufficient Marxist theory, reducing Syrian writers—the subject of their study—to mere categories: reactionaries, liberal capitalists, deluded petty bourgeois, or progressive writers. In their analysis of the causes of the setback, they lash “backwardness,” while confining their criticism of the leaders of the defeat, Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, to their shortcomings and deviation from socialist thought.
In The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness we read about al-Maghout and how he accepted the editorship of Police Magazine; about Haidar Haidar and the Syrian culture wars; about Muzaffar al-Nawwab, who legitimized mob mentality and cloaked it in the garb of literature; and about Hikmat al-Baba—an impulsive revolutionary whose case would have perplexed al-Maʿarri himself. Many of his virtues—his boldness, courage, and defiance of Assad’s authority—are evident, just as many of his vices, harms, and political errors are glaring. He is akin, in this respect, to caricaturist Ali Farzat, who descends from artistic genius to the gutter of Facebook insults, deciding to compete there; or to Saadi Youssef, whose practical positions lagged behind his revolutionary theoretical stances.
The title The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness emerges amid Syrian street debates on transitional justice to say that forgiveness is not an innocent moral value. It may be a tool for closing files, a technique for erasing memory, a language for laundering crimes, or a condition for illusory stability. Accordingly, The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness means a refusal to turn culture into a reconciliatory court without justice. This aligns with the book’s many themes addressing genocide, art, power, the intellectual, despotism, evil, and responsibility.
As for the subtitle, Cultural Criticism on Unstable Frontiers, it frames cultural criticism as a move beyond traditional literary criticism when the latter proved incapable of grasping what lies beyond the text—of systems, powers, and representations operating deep within discourse. Cultural criticism does not begin with questions of beauty, rhetoric, or artistic value alone, but with larger questions: Who speaks? In whose name? In the service of which power? How are meanings produced and legitimized? Here cultural criticism offers a deconstructive reading of discourses, treating literary texts of all genres as cultural texts subject to the logic of representation and hegemony. In this view, the text is neither innocent nor isolated; it is laden with latent systems: power, masculinity/femininity, center/margin, colonialism/liberation, rationality/myth.
The core feature of cultural criticism is that it does not ask, “Is the text beautiful?” but rather, “What does the text pass along without stating explicitly?” Most importantly, it exposes literature’s occasional complicity with authority or dominant values—something Hossam al-Din Muhammad achieves in the texts of this book.
Our author activates cultural criticism by expanding the concept of “text.” A political event, a media discourse, a public figure, or even a debate around a poet or novelist becomes a cultural text open to reading and analysis, and to uncovering the cultural systems that produce the event and grant it legitimacy and meaning. Thus, when he writes about the Syrian conflict, early Islamic history, the genocide in Bosnia, or the immense complexities between biography and thought in certain poets or philosophers, he does not treat facts merely as political data, but as discourses laden with representations, values, and myths. In this sense, he realizes the essence of cultural criticism. For example, in addressing the rise of Trump or Western populism, he does not stop at the president’s personality or decisions; he deconstructs the cultural system that enabled his ascent: the system of fear, white supremacy, and the erosion of liberal rationality. Here, the Trump phenomenon becomes—beyond being a “political aberration”—a cultural symptom of a deeper malfunction in the structure of Western consciousness.
It is worth noting the author’s prose style, marked by an analytical language keenly aware of its function, sparing in ornamentation, and wary of declamatory cadence. This accords with cultural criticism, which views language as an instrument of power; hence its measured, balanced use.
In the study of book titles, a title is read semantically three times: before reading the book as anticipation, during reading to test that anticipation, and after reading to reconstruct it. We may say: if The Epistle of Forgiveness by al-Maʿarri was not an invitation to forgiveness but a critique and interrogation of the logic of forgiveness itself, then the title of Hossam al-Din Muhammad’s book, The Epistle of Non-Forgiveness, is an extension of the critical spirit of The Epistle of Forgiveness—without resorting to hazy or hidden irony. As if ironic forgiveness itself were serious non-forgiveness.
* Syrian writer
