Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm takes the controversy and controversy raised by Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” in the late 1980s as a starting point to address what he calls “the mentality of prohibition and the logic of criminalization” among Arab thinkers, in a panoramic manner, and in other articles - added in later editions of the book - he addresses many of the issues Related issues, such as Orientalism, reverse Orientalism, concepts of cultural invasion, and authenticity. The writer dives behind the implicit meanings, trying to reach the essence, or the real motive behind the issues he discusses, and raises his voice loudly to argue and discuss the opinions of his fellow researchers and intellectuals: such as Edward Said and Adonis. The audacity makes these sober articles an important document of the discussions and dialogues that prevailed among Arab thinkers at that stage, even if one does not agree with any of them. What is important here is the celebration of free thought and debate based on diligence and knowledge.
Although the deep, passionate, and enjoyable discussions contained in this book provide many answers, they also stimulate many renewed questions that continue to trouble us and justify our need for readings of this kind.
“I am suffocating and Tokyo does not sleep
The story of the book is:
I watch the city's inhabitants, programmed like robots, from the window of my narrow room, with dreams of attending those prestigious universities, those dreams that haunt us like ghosts.
Tokyoites wear the same faces, the same fake laugh.
The degree and inclination of bowing to greet one another is the same and does not increase or decrease a degree.”
In the small greenhouse that I built for my dear flowers and roses, secret conversations take place and stories are told. Each of them tells the other her legend and the stories she witnessed and heard.
I hide from them so that they do not notice my presence, and I record everything that happens between them in my notebook. It's always dawn, and I don't realize how long I've been here in this corner. The conversations and stories told by the roses were not happy at all, they were like thorns with their pain.
The notebook contains a mixture of myths, stories, and texts that Al-Basataniyya collected to share with the reader, as he talks about the dark side of unlimited happiness, about disappointments, and betrayals that never heal. About those human relationships that do not rise to the sky.
Briefly, about the definition of pain in its many faces, which are depicted with thorns running down their branches, leaving a prick, a mark on a finger that touched them, and hidden pain.
From every garden is a flower and from every garden is a thorn
Twenty-one thorns that the gardener documented in her notebook, proving that pain is a universal language that is not limited to the poor only, but transcends all social classes that humans have placed through their ignorance.
Pandemic neurosis:
The boat got stuck at sea; The anchor sank deep into the hole of a huge rock. What can Shaddad do, when darkness has mixed in and he can no longer see the palm of his hand in front of him?! He sat on the stern of the boat, with his fishing gear next to him, which did not harvest anything from the bottom of the sea, and the wind began to shake the chest of the boat, and it rose and fell like a camel trotting in a desolate desert valley, and Shaddad’s body shook as if it were on the top of a howdah.
Fear began to overwhelm him when the wave roared, and the boat flopped between towering mountains whose thunder rose, and complete darkness surrounded existence, the color of deep black holes.
