Dar Arab – förlag

This book examines the political and strategic trajectory pursued by the Prophet Muḥammad (ﷺ) during a mission that spanned twenty-three years, and it carefully considers the regional and international contexts within which the Prophet’s (ﷺ) life played out. From an examination of his biography, it seeks out the fundamentals and principles of the new methodology that resulted in the greatest-ever strategic and historic transformation of the international system. The Prophet’s (ﷺ) biography is replete with lessons for individuals, communities, and nations. In this era of unpredictability and rapid change, humanity is in dire need of a new philosophical vision and a fresh start. The western hegemony that has dominated the global stage for the past three centuries has reached a point of bankruptcy, where it can no longer offer creative solutions that might guarantee a secure future for humanity. The world’s civilisational and cultural heritage is rich and diverse, encompassing much wisdom and collective experience that has been accumulated over many millennia. Our present malaise demands that we study this enormous human capital and draw lessons from it so that we might devise solutions for the future that are inspired by a multiplicity of sources, including Islam.

In The Rock of the Land, acclaimed journalist Ahmad Vall Dine delivers a riveting account of Afghanistan's relentless resistance against foreign dominations. From the Soviet invasion to the recent U.S. withdrawal, Val Dine intertwines meticulous research with personal narratives, unveiling the nation's enduring spirit amidst perpetual conflict. This compelling work not only chronicles historical events but also delves into the human stories behind the headlines, offering readers an intimate understanding of Afghanistan's geopolitical landscape and the cyclical nature of its struggles.

The Handsome Jew is a challenging and provocative novel that urges/ invites Muslims and Jews to contemplate themselves and the way they see the other through a doomed love story. This powerful novel tells the tragic saga of two lovers, Salem, a Jew, and Fatima, a Muslim, who fall in a forbidden, intense, and passionate love against all circumstances designed to divide them in a society bound by religion. This boundary-crossing love story epitomizes the doomed relationship between Jews and Muslims in Yemen, sheds light on how each community sees the other, interrogates religious and social barriers, and proves that, against all odds, love can conquer all – OR till death do the fated couple part.

The Secret of the Morisco is a picaresque tale of Robert, a young Englishman taken captive by the Spanish Armada in the 17th century, as he sails home after procuring an Arabic printing press in the Netherlands. Thrown into prison for nothing more than his own bad luck, Robert befriends a Christianised Moor, Yusuf, who cautiously recounts the story of his family’s flight from Spain following the Edict of Expulsion in 1609 and divulges the existence of lost Arabic manuscripts, setting Robert off on an adventure taking him from Spain to Holland, Italy, and Ottoman Syria in search of the invaluable trove.More than a thrilling story about the emergence of the Arabic printing press or lost manuscripts, The Secret of the Morisco draws heavily on events from the Scientific Revolution, the Thirty Years’ War, and the often turbulent relations with the Ottoman Empire to highlight a period of intense cultural interaction and increasing competition between Europe and the Islamic world. Memoir-like and written from Robert’s perspective, the novel interrogates notions of belonging, the permeability of boundaries, and the ambiguous dichotomy between East and West. Deeply researched and easily accessible to the general reader, The Secret of the Morisco is historical fiction at its finest and offers a unique perspective on a critical period of history.

Teeming with Arabs, Indians, Somalis, Europeans, and others, Aden is like no other city in the world. A transcendent city. A city for all, no matter Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or animist. And when “Michel,” a young Frenchman, washes ashore, fleeing his past in search of a new future, he’s immediately drawn into this intoxicating cocktail of dreamers, revolutionaries, artists, and politicians who have all found a place within the city’s vibrant atmosphere.Yet not all is as it seems. Monumental changes and forces are bearing down on Aden, threatening to erupt and refashion its identity, and redefine who can lay claim to the city that has always welcomed misfits.Adeni Incense interrogates concepts of belonging, identity, and who is entitled to speak for the whole. While set within a unique time period in Yemen’s history, the novel is timely today as the centrifugal forces of national chauvinism and parochialism seek to further entrench psychological borders between people.With its richly developed scenes and moving depiction of a society teetering on a precipice, Adeni Incense is a masterwork of storytelling, leaving the reader with indelible memories of beloved characters and uncertainty over the viability of pluralism and diversity.

Land of Sweetheart Deals is a tragic cautionary tale that explores a government’s manipulation of print and social media as well as the sexual exploitation and trafficking of juveniles in Yemen. The narrator of this novel presents himself as the reader’s expert guide to Yemen’s slipperiest slopes, physical and moral, and then plummets down them headfirst. This amiable narrator and protagonist, Mutahhar Fadl, is assigned by the editor of a pro-government newspaper to leave his normal beat in Sana’a and travel to Hodeida to report on the rape of a child. He soon realizes that his true mission is not to cover a trial but to cover-up the crime, because the accused rapist is a government loyalist. Mutahhar’s marriage, career, and integrity are tested when the seductive perks of his assignment tempt him to become the novel’s antihero. While he tumbles down a dark rabbit hole with many twists and turns, one wonders whether Mutahhar’s government handlers know him better than he knows himself.

Premonition News Flash by Yass Assaidi is a powerful poetry collection exploring oppression, violence, love, and existential turmoil with vivid imagery and emotional depth. In a lyrical yet raw voice, Assaidi delves into the dynamics of victims and oppressors, personal and political betrayal, and haunting premonitions. Divided into three sections—on killers and the killed, a lover’s anguish, and an orphaned father's sorrow—the poems blur personal grief with collective struggle. Winner of the 2024 Bait Al-Ghasham DarArab International Translation Prize (Authors' Category), the work, translated by Mbarek Sryfi, captures the raw edge of contemporary Arab identity.

A storm delivers a boy to the shores of Ras Madrakah, a forgotten village where the sea speaks in riddles and the rocks seem almost alive. Sheikh Shaleh takes the boy in, convinced he is a gift from God. The same storm that wrecks a ship appears to reveal a long-buried secret. Across the sea, in the quiet chapels of Leeds, Sophia sends her husband David into the desert in search of that secret, guided by signs she believes are divine. Told with the shimmer of Arabian Nights and the wonder of Sinbad’s voyages, The Sailor’s Secret is a tale of omens, shipwrecks, and the stories that carry us home.

When Rashid and his sister Rayya leave their mountain village, they carry little with them—only what necessity allows. What they leave behind does not loosen its hold.In Muscat, the world rearranges itself. Land gives way to labour, and kinship to survival. What once sustained them now belongs to others.The Garden We Carry is a novel of displacement without spectacle. Refusing drama in favour of accumulation, it traces the slow transformation of a life once rooted in land into one governed by work, hierarchy, and power.With remarkable restraint, Bushra Khalfan renders a world in which dignity is tested not through crisis, but through endurance—and where freedom is not lost all at once, but gradually, almost imperceptibly.This is a novel about what remains when everything else has been taken—and what must be carried forward.

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated by Marilyn Booth—translator of the 2019 International Booker Prize-winning Celestial Bodies—is a darkly humorous and powerful novel that captures war through Kamiran, a 13-year-old Kurdish boy. Fleeing Afrin with his family, Kamiran undergoes a surreal transformation—his body turning to chalk, a haunting symbol of identity erased by conflict. Blending sharp wit with deep sorrow, the novel explores trauma, displacement, and resilience.

When a seventeen-year-old flees his violent father and heads to Cairo to chase his dream of breaking into the arts, he ends up in a crumbling flat with a mercurial landlady and her volatile son. Set in the early 1990s, The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer is a sharply observed, darkly comic coming-of-age novel about ambition, survival, and the strange intimacies forged by necessity. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this cult-favourite debut by Egyptian screenwriter, journalist, and satirist Belal Fadl appears in English for the first time, in a vivid translation by Osama Hammad.

The War is a haunting, psychologically rich novel about memory, love, and the invisible wounds carried long after the battlefield falls silent. On a snowy night in suburban America, Issa Saleh prepares to welcome Krystyna—his closest friend, caretaker, and the woman who once pushed him toward a war he barely survived. But as he searches for her through his house, she seems to vanish into thin air. What begins as an anxious wait spirals into a hallucinatory collapse in which the borders between the present and the Dhofar war of his youth dissolve.Through fractured memories, Issa relives the brutal campaign that shaped him: comrades lost in explosions, the chaotic return of the “victorious” soldiers, and the political betrayals that rewrote the country’s history in real time. At the heart of it all lies a deeper wound—his desire to be the hero Krystyna once expected, and the unbearable fear that the man who returned from war is not the one she loved, but a stranger, a double, or a ghost of the dead soldier he might have been.Structured with cinematic ambition and written in a lyrical, immersive style, The War moves between Washington, Muscat, and Dhofar, blending reality, hallucination, and memory into a portrait of a man unraveling under the weight of trauma. It is an exploration of exile, masculinity, political mythmaking, and the private battles fought long after the shooting stops. Winner of the 2023 Katara Prize for Arabic Novel, Mohammed Al-Yahyai’s work stands as one of the most powerful contemporary narratives on the psychological aftermath of conflict in the Arab world.

In a city strained by fear and uncertainty, lives intersect in fleeting moments of intimacy, loss, and endurance. Hush Now, Canary unfolds through a polyphonic structure, giving voice to the living, the displaced, the imprisoned, and the dead, each bearing witness to how ordinary life fractures under pressure. Blending stark realism with subtle surrealism, the novel resists grand explanations and instead lingers on gestures, silences, and the fragile persistence of memory.A canary moves through the narrative as a recurring presence—at once observer, symbol, and thread—binding together stories shaped by disappearance and survival. Told with restraint and lyrical precision, Mustafa Khalid’s novel is less concerned with spectacle than with how people continue to speak, remember, and exist when certainty collapses. Translated with clarity and sensitivity by William Hutchins, Hush Now, Canary is a powerful work of contemporary literary fiction that affirms the endurance of voice in moments of profound rupture.

Shaul Ben ʻAmithaʼīl Zāz has lived through centuries of Moroccan Jewish life. Or so he tells us.In the Mellah, the Jewish quarter of Fez, he moves among crowded taverns, family quarrels, shared meals and whispered fears. Jews and Muslims live as neighbours, their lives bound together by friendship, trade, desire and suspicion. As people leave Morocco for Israel, the stories follow them, carrying memories of home into the uncertainties of another life.Moving freely through time and between voices, Mohamed Azzedine Tazi brings an inhabited world into view: its pleasures and cruelties, its intimacy and divisions. I, the Forgotten is a novel about belonging, departure and the lives that remain in memory after their streets have fallen silent.

Without tells a story of searching for belonging both in the world and within your own skin. Born in Saudi Arabia to a Yemeni family, the novel’s protagonist has been ill-at-ease since childhood, because she never felt like she was a girl. Alia’s alienation grows as she slowly comes to realise that she is, in fact, a man and begins the transition to live life as Ali.This is a very important story to tell as it portrays the struggles of gender non-conforming people in society. The novel is sensitive and frank in how it approaches an intersex person’s struggles with the realities of love, friendship, and survival against the backdrop of a life lived between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and then later the UK. Without navigates complex issues in a very human way, painting an honest portrait of how people come to terms with challenges they never expected they would face. Told in a deceptively simple style, through a tightly woven and skillful narration, Without makes these struggles resonate with us all.

Hussein is one among millions of displaced Syrians who lost their homes and country, seeking refuge around the world. His narrative biography relates the experiences of an asylum-seeker’s interactions with people he meets after leaving Syria, each chapter a new facet of his journey. Entwining themes of belonging, identity, and family, the stories diverge in chronology and capture snapshots of myriad locations, ultimately reuniting around the central conversation between the refugee and Agatha Christie, though her biography, Come, tell me how you live, and mystery novel, And Then There Were None. From his Syrian hometown to Lebanon, Egypt, Scotland, and England, Hussein maps the path of a man cast out of his familiar world. The reader falls into the refugee’s nostalgic and painful recollections, his sometimes bitter, sometimes hopeful speculations. No One May Remain is a raw and candid perspective from a Kurdish-Syrian author on the war in Syria, the refugee crisis, and life for a refugee in the West.

Widowed at a young age, Zahra finds herself being forced into a hasty marriage to her cousin. Having been conditioned by her family and society to perennially obey the society’s diktats, taking destiny into her own hands seems nigh impossible. Her radical decision to do so takes her on the journey of discovery from an Omani village perched atop a mountain to the East African coast. But of more importance than her physical journey through space is her internal one: of how far Zahra has to go to be free from the shackles of discrimination to finally find her place in the world, and what that search for independence holds for her.