Al Majalla’s Book Watch

History and fiction interweave throughout the novel. Through that fusion, Sciascia moves beyond conventional storytelling to deliver a piercing critique of the mechanisms of power and the ways in which authority manufactures its own version of truth. History here is a pliable substance, shaped to justify present injustices and reinforce the legitimacy of those with power. It is not merely a backdrop. Through the forgery orchestrated by Father Vella, Sciascia poses his central question: who makes history, and who holds the right to interpret it?

Reason and Tenderness

Author: Saeed Nasheed

Publisher: Dar Al Tanweer, Lebanon

Reason and Tenderness: A Philosophical Trial of Love approaches its subject matter from philosophical, existential, and human perspectives simultaneously. It does not treat love as a romantic condition or a passing feeling. Instead, it places it at the centre of enduring questions about pain, meaning, and how people live together. In doing so, it offers a vision that reshapes familiar ideas about love and challenges inherited assumptions.

Nasheed begins with a central premise: philosophy is not a cold hunt for truth, nor a pursuit of abstract concepts as it is often presented. Above all, it is an attentive listening to human conscience and human suffering. For that reason, the book reads less like an academic lesson and more like an inward meditation. Nasheed presents love as a space of vulnerability and hardship, yet also as a wide horizon through which the self can continually surpass itself, without respite.

The book draws on a range of philosophical and spiritual voices across human history to defend love or to put it under scrutiny, from Plato to Kant, from Spinoza to Heidegger, alongside Sufi thought and its experiential sensibility.

From these voices, Nasheed weaves a dialogue that suggests love is neither a single idea nor a repetition of the same narrative. Rather, it is a value system that moves between desire, freedom, and responsibility. Love is not an emotional state detached from reason, nor a rational principle stripped of feeling. It is the meeting of reason and tenderness, says the author.

The book also distinguishes between love as a lived, existential experience and the rose-tinted image promoted by romantic culture. Human beings, Nasheed suggests, often distort love when they turn it into a project of salvation or burden it with impossible dreams. At its core, love is a daily craft. It calls for spiritual steadiness and practical conduct. These are expressed in apology, attentive listening, patience, and respect for the other's vulnerability.

This is a deeply human philosophical work restoring love as an existential value, drawing strength from reason and flourishing within the realm of tenderness. It presents love as an experience that completes us, offering the reader a deeper, more realistic understanding of what makes love possible, necessary, and joyful.

Contemporary Arab Philosophy

By: Al Nassir Amara

Publisher: The University Foundation for Studies and Publishing, Lebanon

The Algerian writer Al Nassir Amara's book arrives at a moment of growing interest in reexamining the Arab philosophical question, in ways that reflect the profound cultural, social, and intellectual shifts across the Arab world. It also speaks to an increasing need for critical approaches that can renew contemporary philosophical thought.

Amara explores the possibility of producing a contemporary Arab philosophy that engages with present-day issues without falling into imitation or dependency. He raises central questions about Arab thought's capacity to generate new concepts and to rebuild its conceptual apparatus in line with the challenges of the age. He also examines the limits of this project, whether rooted in historical and cultural legacy or in institutional and educational obstacles that hinder the development of an Arab philosophical discourse.

He closely analyses the conditions that allow, or could allow, the emergence of an Arab philosophical project capable of opening itself to other philosophies worldwide while retaining its own epistemic particularity. He offers a critical reading of the trajectory of modern Arab thought, asking why efforts to establish a coherent Arab philosophy have faltered over the past decades. To move beyond this impasse, he proposes adopting more flexible, dynamic methodologies for approaching texts and concepts.

The author also underscores the importance of restoring philosophy's role within Arab cultural debate, and the need to integrate philosophical thinking into the treatment of social questions such as identity, modernity, rationality, interpretation, and freedom. It is a serious attempt to reaffirm philosophy as a critical instrument and a means of producing knowledge, rather than an academic subject isolated from life.

The book is a significant contribution to discussions about the future of Arab philosophy, and an attempt to open new horizons for a critical intellectual project. One that seeks to move beyond inherited frameworks and engage with the possibilities of Arab intellectual and philosophical creativity.

Law and the Struggle of Interpretations

Edited and coordinated by: Lahcen El Hamidi, Badr Boukhlouf, and Sounia Ennaouali

Publisher: Moroccan Institute for Political and Parliamentary Studies and the International Network of Researchers, Morocco

This volume is a collaborative scholarly work that can be regarded, without hesitation, as an important addition to legal libraries in Morocco and across the Arab world. It seeks to open contemporary debates about the nature of law and the ways it should be understood. It argues against limiting interpretation to a literal reading of texts, urging readers to view law as a contested arena in which multiple schools of thought compete over the meaning of legal provisions and their application in social and political life.

The book brings together a collection of peer-reviewed studies by researchers, judges, and academics from Morocco and other countries. Its topics range from theories of legal interpretation to issues arising in the application of legal rules within administrative justice, constitutional review, and analytical examinations of foundational legal issues.

The volume aims to clarify the relationship between literal interpretations of legal texts and approaches that take account of social and political change. Law cannot be separated from the contexts in which it operates, nor from the values held by legal practitioners. In this sense, interpretation is a complex intellectual process in which law intersects with politics, culture, and society.

The book advances a central proposition: conflict over interpretation reveals a plurality of forces and perspectives. On one side are those who adhere to established legal rules and traditions. On the other are those who seek to reinterpret texts in ways that align with, or respond to, modern shifts in rights, freedoms, and social justice. This interpretive struggle does not unfold only in the courts. It extends to academia, legal practice, and the concerns of civil society, reaching as far as parliaments in their capacity as legislative institutions.

The book also examines the role of legal actors themselves in interpretation. Judges do not read texts in isolation from their professional experience. Researchers do not separate theory from practice. Legislators seek to refine drafting in the public interest. Meanwhile, theoretical debates shape public policy and influence the evolution of rights.

The volume may serve as a key reference for those working in the legal field, including professors, researchers, judges, lawyers, and parliamentarians, as well as civil society organisations concerned with human rights. Its editors argue that it makes an effective contribution to the development of legal research and judicial practice, and that it deepens understanding of interpretive mechanisms as Arab legal systems confront their current challenges.