Some cultural projects do more than publish books. They preserve encounters: with a writer, an idea, a body of work, and the questions that remain long after the final page.
Antonine University (UA) marked the return of Ism Alam, the cultural series published by UA Press, with an evening dedicated to writer, historian, and intellectual Dr. Fawwaz Traboulsi and the launch of the series’ 15th volume, “Fawwaz Traboulsi: Writing Passion and Dissent.”
Held at the Hadat–Baabda Campus, the gathering brought together members of the University community, intellectuals, academics, media professionals, contributors to the volume, and members of Traboulsi’s family. Among those in attendance were Abbot Joseph Bou Raad, Superior General of the Antonine Maronite Order (OAM) and UA Chancellor; Fr. Michel Saghbiny, UA Rector; members of the Supreme Council; Fr. Jean Al Alam, Secretary General; Fr. Joe Bou Jaoude, Bursar; vice rectors; and Dr. Pascale Lahoud, founder and coordinator of the Ism Alam series.
More than the launch of a new volume, the evening marked the return of a cultural project built around encounters with influential voices in intellectual and cultural life: their works and trajectories, but also the questions, tensions, and ideas they leave open for others to pursue.
After the Silence, Ism Alam Returns
The evening began by looking backward.
A retrospective presentation revisited the previous volumes of Ism Alam, recalling the writers and intellectuals whose works had shaped the series before it entered a period of interruption. That pause, and what it meant for a cultural project founded on books and conversation, became part of the story of its return.
In his address, Fr. Saghbiny reflected on the years that had weighed on Lebanon, its institutions, and its cultural life. The interruption of Ism Alam, he explained, was neither a retreat from its mission nor a departure from the University’s commitment to books and culture. It was an unavoidable silence before the series could take up its journey once more.
Its return therefore carried a meaning beyond the continuation of a publishing project. It renewed a commitment to memory and dialogue, and to the book as a space where lived experience can meet the present and remain available to the future.
Turning to the evening’s honoree, Fr. Saghbiny situated the tribute within a broader reflection on the role of the intellectual. To honor Traboulsi was also to recognize an approach to knowledge grounded in continuous questioning and responsibility, and a form of writing that does not simply document what happened, but encourages readers to consider its meaning.
In a context where history can easily be reduced to competing slogans and identities, he called for an approach centered on thinking rather than alignment, understanding rather than ready-made judgments, and questioning history rather than seeking refuge in it.
Passion, Dissent, and the Freedom to Think
If the opening of the evening was about return, what followed turned toward the two ideas chosen to accompany Traboulsi’s name in the new volume: passion and dissent.
Excerpts from a filmed interview conducted by Dr. Lahoud with Traboulsi traced parts of his journey and revisited some of his most significant works. His written voice then gave way to the spoken word as actor Jihad Al Atrash recited Traboulsi’s poem “Qamar Machghara,” accompanied by Hamza Hamieh, a student at UA’s Faculty of Music and Musicology, on the qānūn.
Introducing the commemorative volume, Dr. Lahoud explained that it brings together contributions from researchers from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, and Canada. Faced with a body of work extending across disciplines, forms, and decades, the book does not attempt to contain or summarize it. Rather, it offers different points of entry and invites readers to engage with it.
Her reflection returned to the two words at the heart of the book’s Arabic title.
Passion, in this reading, was not simply enthusiasm, but an enduring attachment to the world, to people, and to meaning, particularly at a moment marked by collective fatigue and increasingly fragmented attention.
Dissent pointed elsewhere: toward the freedom to think beyond what has already been prescribed.
In a digital environment increasingly shaped by algorithms and anticipated preferences, Dr. Lahoud underscored the importance of preserving the ability to ask questions that have not been suggested, to remain with complexity, and to think against prevailing currents.
Addressing Traboulsi directly, she placed the meaning of the University’s homage not in similarity or agreement, but in something more essential to intellectual life: the value of a passion capable of awakening passion in others, and of a dissent capable of protecting the freedom to think.
A Life Revisited Through Writing
When Fawwaz Traboulsi took the floor, the evening moved from reflections on his work to the experiences from which that work had emerged.
He returned to his childhood between Machghara and Zahle, and to early encounters with the Arabic language, literature, poetry, and history. There, curiosity began taking shape long before it would find expression through journalism, translation, teaching, and historical research.
His reflections moved through defining moments in Lebanon and the Arab world that influenced his intellectual and political formation. Following years of political engagement, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Traboulsi moved to Paris in 1984, where he resumed his university studies and increasingly devoted himself to teaching, writing, and historical research.
Looking back on that passage from lived experience to intellectual work, he described what followed as a process of “manufacturing experiences”: returning critically to what had been lived, interrogating it, and transforming it into knowledge that could be shared with others, particularly younger generations.
That relationship between experience and knowledge appeared across the different forms his work has taken. Speaking about translation, he recalled his conviction that a successful translation should read as though the text had originally been written in Arabic. From teaching came another lesson: the teacher, too, is someone who learns.
Across journalism, translation, teaching, popular culture, and historiography, knowledge emerged not as something fixed, but as something continually tested and reshaped through experience, exchange, and questioning.
Traboulsi concluded by reflecting on his research into war, violence, and the impact of military aviation on civilians, before thanking Fr. Saghbiny, Dr. Lahoud, and the UA community for the tribute.
At the close of the ceremony, UA Rector presented Fawwaz Traboulsi with the University’s Silver Feather in recognition of his intellectual and literary contributions.
The evening ended, but the questions at its heart were not meant to.
With the return of Ism Alam, UA renews a space in which cultural memory is not only preserved, but revisited; where intellectual heritage is not placed at a distance, but brought into conversation with the questions of the present; and where writers, researchers, and readers can meet across generations and perspectives.
In that space, books become more than records of what has already been thought. They become invitations to return, to question, to disagree, and to read again.
And perhaps that is where Ism Alam finds its meaning once more: not only in honoring a name, but in keeping alive the freedom to think beyond it.