Twenty years ago, it would have been Edward Said. It’s Traboulsi, his best translator, in 2023.
Amal Ghandour
Why one, I wondered? One Middle Eastern public intellectual, TMR asked. The most inspired and relevant, they specified. I quickly counted at least four of them as interpreters of my life. All inspired and relevant. I waited a minute; another three followed.
But if Jean-Paul Sartre’s definition of the intellectual as a “technician of practical knowledge” holds true (and it is TMR’s own cue), then Fawwaz Traboulsi exemplifies it. The sum of this 82 year-old sage is a decades-long remarkable union between implacable activism on the leftist front and the solitude of the pen. The pen as creator, as translator, as storyteller, as scholar, as analyst, as advocate, six vocations like feisty sisters in a boisterous house.
It’s the range and depth of Traboulsi’s intellectual quests that astound as well. There is no clear connection — that I can see at least — between his work and what obsesses many of us today, from the mystique of social media and its influencers to the seriousness of Artificial Intelligence and its consequences, but he is a master of contexts, old and new, and there is no real shape to the here and now without those.
But perhaps it’s the rigor of Traboulsi’s intellect and its accessibility that makes him my obvious choice. There is ideological anchor but no dogma in this man. He is forever contemporary, forever keen to engage across generations and aisles.
Twenty years ago, it would have been Edward Said. It’s Traboulsi, his best translator, in 2023.
Visit Fawwaz Traboulsi’s Goodreads page.
