In 1953, the Lebanese writer Suhayl Idris (1925-2008), with Bahij Uthman and Munir al-Baalbaki, founded a new literary journal, al-Adab, in Beirut. He served as its editor from 1956 to 1992 while working closely with his wife, Aida Matraji. The text printed here is the translation of the Arabic introduction to the journal’s first issue.

Idris had begun to discuss the need for such a journal as a doctoral student in Paris—he received his PhD, on “The Foreign Influences on Modern Arabic Fiction from 1900 to 1950,” in 1952—an experience on which he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, al-Hayy al-latini, The Latin Quarter (1953). That text, as other texts of his, also reflected his vivid literary and political interest in existentialism. As Yoav Di-Capua has shown in No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (2018), Idris and many other Arabs in the 1940s-1960s in Europe and the Arab world embraced existentialism, a philosophical trend identified with the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre. They adapted the perhaps central-most existentialist issue—human individuals’ fundamental ability to free themselves from what controls them and shape their own existence—such that it fit their experience and demands in the early postcolonial years. Sure, a good number of Arab Marxists criticized existentialism for being individualistic. And yes, Arabs eventually turned away from Sartre, as their earlier hero signed a letter in support of Israel on the eve of the June 1967 Six-Day War. (Sartre was influenced by massive French Jewish fears that a second Holocaust was coming Israel’s way, which was voiced also by a close collaborator of his, Claude Lanzmann.) But for two decades before 1967, existentialism was extremely useful.

Although political independence from European imperial control was proceeding apace in many parts in the Middle East, though not everywhere, colonialism continued to cast a long shadow. Hard questions about real cultural authenticity (asala) vis-à-vis the West and full-on existential sovereignty (siyada)after many decades of European control remained to be tackled. And true intellectual decolonization—full freedom also in this realm—was necessary. One strand of Arab existentialism, embraced by Idris and others, demanded that literati be steeped in their society and write with total commitment (iltizam) to it, its political needs, and its cultural identity—all while linking their new works also to the non-Arab world, as this text shows.