The value of humanity: the stories of Mohammed Al-Sharekh
The melting pot of creativity and intertextual resonances in masters of the short story such as Anton Chekhov, Horacio Quiroga and Clarice Lispector also nourishes the work of Kuwaiti writer Mohammed Al-Sharekh.
In addition to being the visionary entrepreneur who introduced the digital revolution to Kuwait and the Middle East, Al-Sharekh cultivated literature and a love of art with the cosmopolitanism and erudition of his international experiences, without straying from his roots. He is known worldwide for “Arabising technology” through SAKHR, the company he founded by awarding scholarships to the computer scientists who worked there, as recounted in the biographical selection included in this dossier. His development of Arabic systems and characters for computers represents a significant contribution to the study and digital dissemination of Arabic.
It is no exaggeration to say that Al-Sharekh's work on his mother tongue constitutes a cultural and linguistic legacy that will be remembered for centuries. A voracious reader, Al-Sharekh also donated 6,000 volumes from his personal library to the National Library of Kuwait.
Despite a relationship with language mediated by technology, or perhaps because of it, as a writer Al-Sharekh emphasises the value of humanity in his stories. ‘Storytelling is a pleasure,’ he emphasises in his autobiography, evoking the socio-cultural link between narrator and reader.
Al-Sharekh's themes focus on the closest emotional relationships that shape one's character and chart each person's path: filial, marital and friendships. The latter is a theme that, in addition to exploring in his stories, is also featured in the postmodern art collection that bears his name, the fruit of more than 50 years of friendship with artists from across the Arab world, such as Ahmed Morsi, Jamil Shafiq, Adel El Siwi, Ardash Kakafian and Mona Saudi.
Al-Sharekh's literary technique moves easily between the first-person narrator and the omniscient narrator, depending on the story, and a poetic realism which, without becoming magical realism, produces the effect of a profound alteration of reality through anagnorisis or the reader's discovery of the reality of the story's protagonists.
Like Raymond Carver or Hemingway, Al-Sharekh cultivates the poetic nature of his characters' silences. Reading Al-Sharekh's stories therefore becomes a creative act with the author. The reader's imagination adds to the joint creation of the human meaning of the experience, thus amplifying the delight of the narrative. Devices such as characterisation, metaphor, irony and dialogue give Al-Sharekh's prose a rhythm that matches the development of the action, a proportionality that also extends to the geographical setting of his stories.
Parent-child relationships occupy a central place in Al-Sharekh's work, as demonstrated in ‘Childbirth’ and ‘My Son,’ stories that explore the experience of parenthood. Khaled, the young protagonist of ‘Childbirth,’ finds himself in the United States with Salma, his beautiful wife, after accepting a job far from their families. ‘They say giving birth in the United States is better,’ Salma tells Khaled as justification for a move that causes her in-laws distress. This seemingly impersonal observation – ‘they say’ – ironically introduces a note of uncertainty into what at first glance is a story about a young husband who goes out of his way to care for his pregnant wife.
As he prepares to become a father, Khaled remembers his own father as the day of delivery approaches. ‘Last year, around this time, Salma and I were with my father at the hospital,’ he confesses. Al-Sharekh juxtaposes Khaled's hope and happiness at the birth of his child with his concern for Salma, who is having a difficult delivery, and for his father, who is far away. Although the doctors save his baby's life, whether giving birth in the United States is better or not is a question that receives a heartbreaking answer.
If parents represent the past, children are the future. In ‘My Son,’ Al-Sharekh introduces the marriage of Hasan ben Falah Al-Furaiyi and Hassa Bint Khalid Al-Samirani, who lead a relatively normal life until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when the Iraqi army takes all the teenage boys from their village, including their only son, without leaving any clues. Hasan and Hassa—whose names the omniscient narrator changes to ‘Abu Hamad’ or Hamad's father and ‘Umm Hamad’ or Hamad's mother throughout the story—try to maintain a semblance of normality even with the Iraqi commander, but the violence of war thwarts their attempts to maintain their coexistence. When the boys disappear, the couple crosses the desert on a distressing night-time search; finally, they are given a young man with the same name as their son. The parents face the tragic possibility that their real son has died while they take in a stranger in his place.
This ethical and existential dilemma highlights the value of humanity for Al-Sharekh, as do his stories about friendship, which explore what constitutes a friend and the limits of brotherhood. In ‘Secrets,’ the friendship of teenage boys is forged by sharing foreign music after it is banned by their elders; the story highlights not only the desire for independence in human beings, but also the sublime power of art, in this case, music. Much more experimental are ‘The Depot’ and ‘Sharing the Feeling,’ which is reminiscent of Russian and Latin American masters in its setting, a house built in the middle of a cemetery.
Al-Sharekh is a master at capturing the relationship between a character's surroundings and the anticipation of the plot. ‘The night before, according to Farid, Mustafa spent a long time talking about the walks he took with his wife at night in the cemetery, in the moonlight, when everyone was resting in their homes and the cats and wild dogs could not be heard,’ observes the narrator. When, many years later, he and Farid go to comfort Mustafa after he is widowed, they discover that, behind the mask of grief, Mustafa wants them to help him forge a document relating to the deceased's inheritance. When they refuse, old resentments arise, heightening the suspense of the atmosphere through dialogue and revealing the limits of friendship.
But in Al-Sharekh's universe, friendship is ultimately a gift imbued with beauty and art, as in the story ‘Yasem of Kufa,’ inspired by Al-Sharekh's visit to the famous Iraqi city of Kufa, its monuments, and his encounter with an extraordinary calligrapher. An unexpected friendship, symbolised by the razqui rose and its incomparable perfume, blossoms between them despite the differences in their life situations. Their deep connection through art survives the brutal Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, even though Yasem, the calligrapher, dies in exile. The beauty of his calligraphy and their friendship transform the writer's and reader's perception of beauty and goodness, the kalos kai agathos of ancient Greece.
Al-Sharekh's stories highlight the character of his protagonists in strange, even inhospitable environments, and the capacity for transformation that life holds for each of them. They are not infallible heroes, but they are protagonists who choose their own path. Al-Sharekh's work suggests that the ability to do good or evil to another human being in this exercise of freedom, of free will, defines one's own character and, in turn, builds the society we call the world. His stories warn us and prompt us to reflect that despite all the technology and artificial intelligence, when it comes to choosing to be more human, there are still many deserts and paths to cross. Who we are on the other side depends on our hearts and consciences, not on GPS.
Al-Sharekh is featured in issue 18 of Banipal Magazine. This issue also remembers the great Egyptian writer Raúf Músad Basta, recalled by the award-winning translator Salvador Peña Martín. We are also pleased to publish recent texts by three renowned Syrian writers: Lina Hawyan Alhassan, Basheer Al-Baker and Nouri Al-Jarrah. In the autobiographical novel ‘Wolves Never Forget’, Lina Hawyan Alhassan traces the links between personal, collective and official memory. Through the mythologies of the civilisations that have passed through Syria – Greeks, Romans and Byzantines – and symbols such as the wolf, Hawyan Alhassan highlights the tragedy of her family during the Syrian Civil War and how the act of writing is also an act of struggle. ‘Language kills us. It is a universal weapon with which we confront each other,’ she writes.
The weapon of language becomes a prism through which to examine war and the trauma of exile in A Country Other Than the One I Dreamed Of by Basheer Al-Baker. The author develops the central metaphor of the mirage to frame the search for truth that serves as the axis of the text. Saïd Khatibi, the award-winning Algerian novelist, emphasises: ‘The author... embarked on his search for “a country other than the one he dreamed of”, free of archives, relying on the strength of memory.’ In this symbolic journey, Al-Basheer's powerful metaphors merge the author's inner landscape with the geography of his history.
The union of different places becomes a journey through time in ‘The Stone Serpent,’ the excellent collection of poems by Syrian poet and critic Nouri Al-Jarrah, an ecphrastic interpretation of the mystery of Berates of Palmyra's elegy for his beloved Regina in a frieze carved during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. Al-Jarrah imagines Berates of Palmyra as a Syrian archer conscripted into the Roman Legion who questions the empire that links places as disparate as Rome, Damascus and Arbeia and has cast him into painful exile. ‘It is as if my gods no longer have eyes to see me,’ narrates Al-Jarrah's moving verse.
Jacques Derrida points out that literature expresses ‘the premonition of something that is not yet formed... like the advent of a glimmer or a shadow of the future.’ The writers featured in this issue of Banipal Magazine invite us to reflect on the power of creativity, memory, passion, and words—the value of humanity—to confront evils such as tyranny, war, and poverty. Celebrating the return of light heralded by the winter solstice, we wish you good health and a Happy and Prosperous 2026!
The photo essay ‘Arab Literature at the Guadalajara International Book Fair’ chronicles the third year of collaboration between Banipal and this renowned literary event in the Spanish-speaking world, and the participation in presentations and round tables of writers Samer Abu Hawwash (Palestine), Huda Al-Naemi (Qatar), Latifa Labsir (Morocco) and Samuel Shimon (Iraq).
Joselyn Michelle Almeida, PhD, is the author of the poetry collection ‘Condiciones para el vuelo’ (Libros del Mississippi, Madrid 2019) and several studies and articles on Anglo-Hispanic philology. She studied Classical Studies and English Philology at Tufts University and received her PhD in Philosophy and Letters from Boston College. Her professional experience spans the field of language and literature as a teacher and researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and other American universities, and as an editor and translator. Among other honours, she has been a Fulbright and National Endowment for the Arts fellow in the United States.