A biography open to others and an editor who dared to ban

The day before yesterday, death was absent from Riad Najeeb Al-Rayyis (1937-2020), “the last of the Jarijites”, which had an exceptional mark on the history of the Arab press. With a pen and a camera, he wandered the desert sands and through seas, continents and mythical cities. The poet lost on the borders of “Poetry Magazine” found his eloquence in journalistic writing, trying to complete the legacy of his father, Naguib al-Rayyes, founder of the Damascene newspaper “Al-Qabas”, before the nationalization law arrived. , at the time of the Egyptian-Syrian unity, then the censorship law, when he decided to reissue it, at the beginning. The third millennium of Damascus as “a newspaper for two peoples”.

A brave adventurer who never stopped dreaming. As soon as one project fails, he will think of another, without abandoning his motto “either freedom or no freedom.” Al-Rayyes finished his studies at Cambridge University, armed with Anglo-Saxon culture on the one hand, and wearing the mantle of Arabism on the other, in addition to an endless passion for intercontinental journalism, recording the events of wars and riots in burning countries stretching from the Arab Gulf to Vietnam, and from Samarkand to Zanzibar, as a reporter. Wandering with an ever-open appetite to discover unknown maps and secrets of what happens in closed rooms.

A biography open to the biographies of others, of those who made a story of hope and sought to change the world, such as Yusef Al-Khal, Tawfiq Sayegh, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Ghassan Tueni, since he always put his signature on the pulpits of the others, in a different ink, from “poetry” and “dialogue to” The Hunter “,” Al Hayat “and” An-Nahar “, before he established his own platform. Thus, “Al-Manar” emerged from London (1977), after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, as the first Arab weekly of the Diaspora, which was followed by “Riyadh Al-Rayyes Books Company”, the most daring Arab publisher and open, the house that attracted problematic, prohibited and controversial titles, Before settling in Beirut, the capital of Arabic books, without its owner being interested in the lists of prohibited books in this or that capital. His project will be completed by the magazine “Al-Naqid” (1988-1995), which has sparked burning and bold literary and intellectual debates, which we believe were not repeated later in any Arab press forum on the “culture of the enlightenment” .
It was customary for you to leaf through your issue of the magazine with the torn pages of a poem, an intellectual article, or a chapter from a forbidden novel with the censor’s scissors. This is how Riad Al Rayyes was a spiritual father rather than the owner of a platform that controlled its content. We read his biography in the profession of the riots, and we lament the setbacks, the partisans and the lies that the Arab press has become, as if that golden age will not return again. This man used to say “no” in the age of “yes”. Al-Rayes books keep a literary tone in describing the conditions, which tempts the reader to immerse themselves in the contents of the crowded “mailbox”. There are no free letters here, but stories of passion for a profession carried out with secrets, paradoxes and scandals. Hybrid writing that always makes fresh bread from the dough of the day, whether in journalistic cooking or in the futility of history and the winds of politics. He is also Sinbad who sought to break the tower’s egg with the hammer of difference and audacity in disclosure, crossing barbed wire and minefields, not only with what he writes, but also because of what others write in the pulpits that he successively founded. Dar Al-Rayyes was a refuge for those fleeing the hell of censorship in their country, and if the manuscripts forbidden here and there, they find a way out to live and a window to the light, from the place of antagonism.
Thus he launched the “Youssef Al-Khal Poetry Prize” and the “Arab Fiction Critics Prize”, giving way to dozens of new voices as an additional wave in the book of modernity. On the shelves of this library, we discover the writings of Al-Sadiq Al-Nihoum, Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm, Fawaz Trabelsi and others, in other words, the writing of incitement, not the domestication, the writing of Beirut, not the capital letters asleep. Beirut, which was the hotbed of Arab culture, with its cafes and docks, and its guests were exiled Arab intellectuals. And then the exile would turn into a haven of freedom and a field of unrest: “I owned a profession that was only allowed in Lebanon, and Lebanon was proud at that time to become the only country in the Arab world capable of to embrace a free press. ” In “The Long Distance Journalist”, he sheds light on people, attitudes, paradoxes, dialogues and mistakes, to reduce his experience of thirst for the truth. And if Beirut is thirsty and narrow, and Damascus is narrower, the cold has dried up and the road is no longer open to springs.

His story is the story of the Arab press in its golden age

His dream was for “Al Qabas” to emerge from Damascus, after a long period of cover-up. But the hardware bureaucracy thwarted the project. Riyad al-Rayyes is the man with the bills that lose and the projects that win intellectually. For him, the book is a river of knowledge and not a commodity, and the publisher is a store of freedom and not a store of profit and bargaining. The story of the owner of “Koran and swords” is the story of the Arab press in its golden age, without sanctification. “A journalist is like a farmer who carries a pitchfork with which he spreads the wheat of history with its grains raw and intact. Expose juveniles to air. Then it turns. It is more like a silent tank. Life may not give you a chance to empty your memory outdoors. Or you may be attacked by a petty disease that is incompatible with your nature and completely inconsistent with your lifestyle, as in my case this one. Then you must know how to live with it, ”he says.
In his later years, Riyadh Al-Rayyes retired, in the absence of his journalistic projects. “The critic” is absent, “the critics” (2000-2003), and his name is absent from the foreign press, and then he is “hostage.” He had to fight the disease by going twice a week to the hospital for kidney dialysis. We do not know the magnitude of the pain he was enduring, each time his blood was renewed, and what was the content of the memory tape that passed before him, while he was handcuffed by medical devices, a short distance from the abyss. So let’s hear how he laments to himself: “Here you are alone in front of the box of your life, which, like all other people’s funds, does not open easily. You may have to break it or throw it on the ground, in this box you will find crumbs of other people’s postcards or pieces of their boxes, because that is what friends do when they leave. They leave in the memory of those who survived their favorite habits, their voices, their vision of life and their incessant denial of death. This is probably what I do now.

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