Haidar Haidar
Haidar Haidar was a Syrian writer and novelist. He acquired a wide reputation for his critical attitude towards political and religious institutions and his willingness to cover controversial topics in a rational way. He published seventeen books of fiction, short stories, essays and biography, including The Desolate Time, which was chosen by the Arab Writers Union as one of the best 105 books of the 20th century.
Literary career
His novel Walimah li A'ashab al-Bahr,, was banned in several Arab countries, and even resulted in a belated angry reaction from the clerics of Al-Azhar University upon reprinting in Egypt in the year 2000. The clerics issued a Fatwa banning the novel, and accused Haidar of heresy and offending Islam. Al-Azhar University students staged huge protests against the novel, that eventually led to its confiscation. According to a BBC News report about the protests, "the plot centres on two leftist Iraqi intellectuals who fled the injustice of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s. The characters blame political oppression in the Arab world on dictatorships and conservative movements. In one of the most controversial extracts, God is described as a failed artist."In a 2019 interview for the magazine The Common, Hisham Bustani wrote about Haidar: "He has kept a fierce, critical distance from all sides: the dictatorship of the ruling regime in his country of Syria; the dictatorship of public taste and ‘conventions;’ the oppression of dogmatic ideology and the ruling party; the tyranny of power derived from religion."
Haidar died on 5 May 2023, at the age of 87.