Spain as seen by Arabs
"When life introduced me to the dictionary of its ambiguity, I sought joy in the serene parameters of the Earth, to borrow the mercy of its mornings and the warmth of its spring".
Thus opens her own chapter, the Beirut-born Rola Fars Día, author of the idea of capturing in a book the essence of the many conversations she has had with many Arabs, who in addition to their common language and culture are united by an exclusive sentiment: their love for Spain, a land in which they live or have lived, but which has marked them forever.
Author of novels such as 'Forbidden Documents', 'Brazil through the Eyes of the Lebanese' and 'The Descendants', Rola Fars devised with Fadi Nabil Salfeti the construction of 'Spain as Seen by Arabs' (Dar-Alfarabi Publishing House, Beirut). A collection of texts, in Arabic and Spanish, to which writers and diplomats such as Bachar Yaghi, who was head of the Arab League Mission in Spain between 2017 and 2021, the Iraqi specialist in the work of Jorge Luis Borges Bahira Abdulatif Yasin, the Paraguayan Hassan Khalil Día and the American poet Rachida Muhammadi have contributed their poetic and literary vein.
The Gazan Fadi Nabil Salfeti, founder and president of Echo of Spain in Arabic, supervises the work with Rola, another milestone in his career as a trainer and trainer of more than 17,000 people, from ministers to civil servants in various positions and countries. A member of a large number of Arab and international organisations, Fadi Nabil Salfeti points out that "whoever visits Spain for the first time lives a life and feels what he does not feel anywhere else". Ever since then, he has wondered what the secret of this feeling was, which he then goes on to explain in his account.
Stories as full of anecdotes as those told by Hala Kairouz, the Lebanese ambassador to the Kingdom of Spain, who echoes the invaluable Spanish collaboration in the successive tragedies that have devastated her country in recent years, from the Daesh attacks to the devastating explosion in the port of Beirut, experiences that make her see the Kingdom of Spain "with the fragrance of its humanism, a balcony of hope open to the world stage despite all the narrow paths.... an ancient balcony, with exterior details to match, inviting peace and denouncing forms of domination, violence, racial discrimination or discrimination against women".
A lot of history, often forgotten or ignored, is also revealed in the book by Walid Bashir Abuabdalla, ambassador of Libya, who provides documents such as the first "Spanish-Libyan Peace Treaty of 1784" (1198 Hegira), and who also traces a line of connection between the "malouf", a song that emerged from the Andalusian Moaxajas, and the "Tarab Garnati", the song from Granada, which is widespread in Morocco.
"Fear of what awaited me", is the first sensation experienced by journalist and writer Shereen Dagani Atwan (Jerusalem, 1975), when she arrived in Madrid after having been robbed of much of the money she had brought with her to pay for her education. A bitter initial experience later turned into the making of an extensive network of relationships, friends and places, as well as becoming a presenter for Radio Nacional de España for its Arabic broadcasts since 2009.
As Rola Fares Día says, "there is a beautiful and creative Spanish kingdom that encompasses 505,900 loves". A small part of such an enormous amount of heart and soul impulses is collected in this book of stories in which dramas and joys, human experiences of all kinds follow one after the other, all overflowing with a general feeling of belonging: that of being part of an invisible and gigantic community-family, sheltered under the generic name of Spain.
Hanan Saleh Hussein, Reem Khalifa, Adel Mustafa Kamel, Abdo Tounsi, Ghassan Saliba, Marwan Burini and the Spanish ambassador to Baghdad, Pedro Martínez-Avial, complete the picture, in which of course not everyone is there, but everyone is there.
Almost all of them came to the Casa Árabe in Madrid for the multitudinous presentation of a book that is sure to open the way for successive or different continuations. After all, 505,990 love stories - how accurate - are enough for much more.
