“O people I own you like I own my horses and slaves Īnd I tread upon you like I walk on the carpets of my palace.” This indictment of authoritarian Arab regimes was immediately banned throughout the Arab world. In the late 1980s, Qabbani famously conducted a recital in Damascus, which was to be his last, with a scathing political poem titled “The Journal of an Arab Executioner.” He produced tomes of romantic verse peppered with sexual overtones, breaking taboos and shocking Muslim society out of is stuffy mores.Īfter the withering Arab defeat in the six-day war of 1967, he turned to political poetry denouncing Arab dictators, the United States and Israel.
In the war that is now destroying Syria, Nizar Qabbani, the legendary poet who died April 30, 1998, in London has come to be the voice of his tormented nation, the everyman transcending rival loyalties to lay bare the country’s agony and its soul.ĭuring a prolific career that began in the early 1940s, Qabbani took the Arab world by storm. The Lebanese were willing to brand each other as traitors and tear their country to pieces for 15 years but they were not willing to give up one voice that seemed to unite them during their long, bitter conflict - Fairuz, the iconic Lebanese chanteuse whose haunting songs so reflected the hopes and fears of the entire country. Beirut - During Lebanon’s civil war, local radio stations affiliated with the various feuding militias would broadcast endless hours of sectarian vitriol through the night, calling young men to arms, only to then collectively switch to the music of Fairuz to start the day with songs for an hour before the main morning news bulletin.
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