Fayrouz carries many meanings within each of us. It is the beauty of a dazzling voice, the splendor of feeling, memories of childhood, and a fresh, cool breeze that gently slaps our faces on bright mornings while we drink coffee. But it is not like that for the Syrian novelist Nabil Al-Mulhim. It is basically a way to understand the light when it falls on the sea, a way to hear the mountain speaking, and a way to believe that language can become a home.
In his book “The Lady - An Exercise in Survival,” published in a free electronic version away from publishing houses, Al-Mulhim asks: Is there a singer in human history who has carried all these burdens? He answers with unequivocal confirmation: Yes, it is Mrs. Fairouz. Then he explains his idea using the tools of philosophical anatomy, poetic visions, linguistic analysis, and deep contemplations that combine the spirit of poetry with the imprint of musical criticism.
Al-Mulhim points out that he is the son of Syria, which had been searching, since time immemorial, for a window overlooking the sea, and Fayrouz was that sea. This happened before political borders knew their way into songs, as her voice crossed them like light crosses a window pane.
In Syrian homes, as in Lebanese homes, Fayrouz was not a guest. She was part of the morning furniture, the smell of coffee, the cold water in the jars, and that longing that precedes a person even before he knows how to translate the word “nostalgia” in the folds of his soul.
He says: “... Whenever I hear her voice, I feel that the Mediterranean is singing itself, not the sea as water, but as memory, that sea that the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, and everyone who thought they owned it passed by, while the sea kept all its secret in a song.”
Hence, he adds: The Rahbanis did not only create a music school, but they reinvented the place. Before them, the village was a geographical place, and after them it became a spiritual state. “Bikfaya” or “Antelias” or “Bsharri” or “Zahle” or “Beheiriyya” were no longer just names on maps. They became metaphors for man himself. Even those who had never visited Lebanon knew it through the music of the Rahbani brothers, just as a believer knows his holy city from a book whose land he has not visited.
The author states that “when he says the Rahbanis, he is not talking about composers only, but rather about philosophers who hid their philosophy inside the song. They knew that heavy ideas die quickly, while the idea lives on if it walks barefoot within a melody. Then came the language, that great Lebanese discovery, when it emerged from the spoken language as the language of homes to being the language of poetry. From Michel Trad, through Joseph Harb, all the way to Talal Haidar, colloquialism was no longer a dialect, but rather became another homeland for the poem.”
These people, he added, wrote as if they were rescuing the words from their isolation, and returning them to the mother’s mouth, to the smell of the dirt after the rain, and to the stone on which two lovers sat on “Raouche Rock,” and they had exchanged suicide for embraces after the song had seized them. Fayrouz was the musical body of that language, and therefore writing about her is not about the lady singer, but about civilization when it escapes devastation.
It is precisely for this reason that Fayrouz transcends official history, which narrates the names of the victors, while songs narrate the names of the survivors. Official history is like generals, walking and looking forward only, but culture walks while looking in all directions. Perhaps this is what made Nabil Al-Mulhim always feel that the Rahbanis were not writing for Lebanon alone, they were writing for the East, which politics could not create, and that there is a huge difference between establishing a state and establishing an imagination... the state needs borders, but imagination needs... window.
The Rahbanis opened a window through which Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Egyptians, and perhaps even Greeks entered, without anyone asking about their passport. They do not recognize borders except as a temporary misunderstanding between people.
What is amazing is that whenever Al-Melhem thinks about “Fayrouz,” he discovers that he does not remember her voice first, but rather her silence. This may seem like a contradiction, but it is not. There are voices that fill the void, and there are voices that reveal it. The first sounds frighten silence and oppose it, while the second reconciles with it. The real difference between a great singer and an immortal singer is that the first owns his voice, while the second owns the silence that surrounds his voice.
Perhaps this is why Fayrouz did not sing like others. It often seemed as if she was not performing the song, but rather listening to it, but rather composing it in a place that the eye could not see. She did not impose her voice on the words, but rather the words were the ones that called for that voice, just as the earth calls for rain when it reaches its last thirst. Perhaps this is the first sign that art has overtaken its owner, when the artist stops leading the work, and the work becomes what drives it.
The author concludes in his interesting book, saying: “From this angle, (Fayrouz) appears closer to a cultural invention than to an individual talent. Talent explains one thing: why was she able to sing? But it does not explain why this huge number of people listened to it, for more than half a century, without getting bored?
Something else was working secretly, something beyond sound, perhaps beyond music itself.
The secret was not in the throat, but in confidence. That voice trusted the world, even when the world was losing confidence in itself, and this is not an artistic quality, it is a moral quality, and that is why “Fayrouz” remained in the bloodiest moments in the Levant, seeming as if she was speaking from a place that the war had not yet reached.
Not because she ignored war, but because she knew that wars, no matter how long they last, have no future... War lives in time, but beauty lives outside it, and perhaps this is the reason why, after all these decades, we remember a song and forget a military statement.
The novel “Zero Point Five” by the Egyptian writer Ahmed Al-Qarmalawi establishes a world in which the boundaries between the human and the artificial overlap, and in which the awareness of its human hero is mixed with the “ambitions” of the machine. The novel tests the position of man in front of a technology that is no longer just a tool harnessed to serve him, but rather a parallel mind that participates in shaping his experience and testing his will.
The novel was recently published by Diwan Publishing House in Cairo, and since its beginning with the phrase “The reels are surrounding me,” Al-Qarmlawy brings us into the consciousness of his hero and narrator in the first person, and the reels (fast video clips) exert a form of pressure on him, by creating an alternative world that seems more tempting than his reality. Despite his work as a director of personnel affairs in a multinational company, and his apparent financial and social stability, he describes his job as immersed “in the bloat of routine, labor law, and internal regulations,” and he imagines that if another manager were to replace him, “no one would feel any difference.” His fear of becoming “replaceable” is inseparable from his attraction to an experience that promises him to be the center of a world made of his ideas and desires.
The narrative places us in front of a map of the hero’s consciousness, in which “boredom” appears to be part of his formation since childhood, before it escalates into an existential crisis and a sense of meaninglessness towards the middle of his life. Then he finds in the clips that promote the “zero point five brotherhood” experience a promise of another world, especially since it directly addresses his crisis, as he says: “They know how to pull me from the thread of boredom where they want me to be.” The advertisement does not only offer him fleeting pleasure, but it captures a feeling In the past, he felt unable to bear his life as it is, and presented entering the experience as an opportunity to get out of it.
Two worlds, two minds
The first level in the novel consists of the hero’s daily life, the beginning of his age crisis, his job, and his relationship with his young family. The second level begins inside the apartment where the participants in the “zero point five” experiment are isolated, each in a separate room, to go through his experience wearing “simulation glasses,” so that the one place combines participation and isolation. Each participant enters a world in which he is accompanied only by his consciousness and the artificial mind.
The third level is the world that the glasses open to the hero, as he embarks on a long travel journey during which he meets “Patricia,” a festival dancer to whom he is attracted, before their relationship slides into madness. The surprises of the journey lead him to confront his “other” self, and to rediscover his relationship with his wife and his family world, as if the artificial mind reconstructs what lies inside the hero, and gives him the form of people, places, and situations with which he can interact. The journey becomes a confrontation with oneself.
The connection between the two worlds is embodied in “Salma,” an entity developed by artificial intelligence that embodies the hero behind the glasses “with a nice tan and smooth skin.” He sees her and interacts with her, but he keeps asking her: “Are you real?”, a question that increases confusion and doubt about the boundaries between Al-Khwarizmi and the real. Her human features do not determine her nature, as much as they make the distinction between what the hero feels and what he knows about her more difficult.
“Salma” reveals the nature of the experience with a phrase that seems “honest” in its acknowledgment of the limits of the artificial mind: “You are going through this experience alone. There is only you and the artificial mind. It is the one that feeds on your thoughts and obsessions, translating them into life and events. It may make serious mistakes during the translation, as it still has a lot to learn.” Thus, behind the glasses, a “hybrid” world of two minds is formed; The hero supplies the machine with his thoughts and concerns, and it transforms them into places, characters, and events. The fictional setting is neither a pure extension of his consciousness, nor an independent innovation of the artificial mind. What he sees emerges from the interaction between what he knows about himself and what the algorithm makes of that material.
From this exchange emerges the novel's counter-narrative; The artificial mind needs the hero’s experience in order to learn and develop its tools, while the hero is attached to the world that the experience opens up to him, an attachment that approaches “addiction,” as he experiences possibilities and feelings in it that do not seem any less “real” to him than what he experiences outside of it. He becomes at the same time a participant in creating the experience and a material that feeds on it, and the more of himself he provides it with, the more it is able to give him a world from which it is difficult for him to separate.
Philosophical tests
The hero describes his experience in terms that call for ancient questions about truth, existence, and human will. He talks about “truth” and “the darkness of nothingness,” and wonders about the limits of his choice in a world where an algorithm uses his desires and obsessions to lead him on a path that it may have drawn for him in advance. Here, the doubt is not related to whether the images he sees are made, as he knows that he is wearing simulation glasses, but rather whether this knowledge gives him the actual ability to resist their influence on him.
He describes “Patricia,” whom he meets during the experiment, as “true, absolute, fundamental, and beyond doubt.” These descriptions appear to be an attempt by him to cling to one certainty, at a time when he can no longer be certain whether what he sees is coming from his awareness or from the world that the algorithm creates for him, the more his certainty of the truth of his feelings toward her increases.
The language of the novel maintains its connection to current daily details, from the siege of “Reels” clips, and the artificial intelligence tool “Gemini,” to the presence of “Equus” electronic cigarettes as an alternative to traditional cigarettes. This is a vocabulary that Al-Qarmlawy uses to draw the world of his hero before he enters the simulation. The experience does not seem like a sudden break with his life, but rather an extension of a reality in which technology actually interferes in his attention, his daily habits, and his image of himself. From this same reality, the hero gradually moves to become one of the “materials” and resources of the artificial world.
The title “Zero Point Five” intensifies the in-between area in which the novel moves; Despite the ambiguity of its meaning, the fractional number, located between zero and one, suggests the state of the hero suspended between reality and simulation, choice and submission, and perhaps the position of an artificial intelligence whose learning has not yet been completed, and a human being who has not yet reached certainty.
