Editorial

Abstract

To all readers who followed Hawiiyat, the University of Balamand Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from its first issue, I have the pleasure to offer them this Florilege issue after an interruption of four years. It contains mainly philosophical, literary and political studies, as well as research in other domains written by colleagues from the University of Balamand, the Lebanese University, the University of AI-Yarrnouk, the University of Jordan, and the University of Mascara in Algeria. These articles, unveil, in some way, the basic interests of our Balamand Faculty as well as the interests of all those who have participated in this volume. It truly merits our attention. The study by Ghomari Taibi focuses on the current political situation in the Arab world and defends, in its interpretation of the events that are shaking Arab societies, the thesis of "social disintegration". This social disintegration has made those societies open to the ideas and actions of all sorts of adventurers and manipulators. The researches done by Mazen Naous, Peter Williams, Nada Sayed-Ziade and Frank Darwiche analyze various academic questions posed by the literary works that they examine in order to understand and rediscover the authors. Dealing with the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and of Imru' a1-Qais; dealing with the City in French contemporary poetry; dealing with a novel of Vladimir Nabokov or with the problem of "god" in Heidegger's philosophy and the Sufism of Ibn' Arabi , these studies, written with ardour and passion, deserve our admiration. They make us love the works and understand the said authors by giving us profound insight into the human soul. The article by Charbel Dagher, which focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and citizenship, is astonishing and enticing when it relates the aesthetic expressions to political citizenship. Finally, the article of Rajai Khanji and Muhammad Saraireh on the strategies of translation gives new insight into the difficulties of the work of the translators, the go-betweens or passeurs of cultures. The melange of trilingual studies of this ISlh issue of Hawliyat is innovative. I am sure it will elicit reflection and debate. Returning to its annual rendez-vous, Hawliyat is committed, beyond unforeseeable events of the time and the world, to remaining, in the forthcoming issues, a major centre of scientific university research and intellectual life in the pure humanist tradition: the one of freedom of the spirit and intellectual independence.