From an ambitious literary magazine to one of the Arab world’s most prominent publishing houses, Rana Idriss recounts the history of an institution where literature and translation intersected with intellectual commitment and questions of freedom, while Palestine and the Arabic language remained at the heart of its cultural vision.
Seven decades after its establishment, Dar Al-Adab represents far more than the story of a distinguished publishing house. Its history is intertwined with the development of modern Arab culture and its intellectual and literary transformations. Beginning as a magazine launched in Beirut in the early 1950s, the institution grew into a publishing house that promoted modern Arabic fiction and opened wide windows onto world literature. It bore the distinctive imprint of its founder, Suheil Idriss, and continued across generations, with his daughter, Rana Idriss, carrying its mission forward in an era when the publishing industry and reading habits have undergone profound changes.
To mark the seventieth anniversary of the publishing house, Rana Idriss, its director, spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat about the institution’s history and behind-the-scenes experiences. She reflected on her family’s relationship with books, the intellectual principles that shaped its publications, the challenges posed by wars and political upheavals, and the efforts to renew the publishing house and reconnect it with new generations of readers.
The anniversary is being celebrated as part of the Beirut Arab International Book Fair, with a program featuring musical performances, panel discussions, and book signings. The events also include a conversation between Dr. Bilal Orfali and Rana Idriss, in which she discusses her experience and the publishing house’s journey.
From Magazine to Publishing House: The Founding Years
The roots of Dar Al-Adab lie in the literary magazine Al-Adab, which Suheil Idriss began publishing in 1953 on behalf of Dar Al-Ilm Lil-Malayin. He was then in his late twenties. His cultural ambitions, however, extended beyond managing a literary magazine. He wanted to establish an independent enterprise that would allow him to publish the works he believed in and give Arabic fiction a more prominent place in the cultural landscape.
Three years later, he decided to purchase the magazine, encouraged by his mother and his wife, Aida Matrji, who sold their jewelry to help finance the acquisition. In 1956, Dar Al-Adab was established as a publishing house, ushering in a new phase of cultural activity that brought together the magazine, books, and translation.
Rana Idriss explains that the publishing house’s longevity was no accident. Rather, the family had prepared its members from an early age to participate in the work. Recalling her upbringing, she says: “We lived in the publishing house and grew up there. We drank in books with our milk. I cannot remember sitting down to a meal without the conversation turning to a book or a translation.”
Books were part of the family’s everyday life, and the boundaries between home and workplace were not always clearly defined. Suheil Idriss distributed responsibilities among family members: Rana took charge of the publishing house, her brother Samah managed Al-Adab magazine, and their mother, Aida Matrji, oversaw printing and warehouse operations. Suheil himself, after years devoted to literature and translation, dedicated a significant part of his time to lexicography, completing the French-Arabic dictionary Al-Manhal in collaboration with Jabbour Abdel Nour.
Dar Al-Adab was therefore more than a family-run business. It was an intellectual environment in which professional practice intertwined with debate, translation, and reading, fostering a distinctive relationship with knowledge across generations.
A Cultural Project Beyond Publishing
From its earliest years, Dar Al-Adab embraced a wide range of literary and intellectual currents, with a particular interest in existentialist and leftist thought and in works addressing freedom, responsibility, and national liberation. It published and translated works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Colin Wilson, alongside books by Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as the memoirs of Arab political figures.
Rana Idriss recalls her father’s interest in Sartre, particularly because of his support for Algerian independence and his famous statement, Our Shame in Algeria. She explains that his determination to publish such works was not based solely on the idea of freedom, but also on an understanding that linked freedom to responsibility, rather than treating it as an absolute value detached from moral and political obligations.
This vision was reflected in the editorial direction of Al-Adab, which encouraged new forms of Arabic poetry and engaged with the literary transformations associated with figures such as Nazik Al-Malaika, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and Ahmad Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi. Through its openness to emerging poetic and critical movements, the magazine contributed to the debates surrounding the modernization of Arabic literature in the mid-twentieth century.
Yet this openness was inseparable from Suheil Idriss’s Arab nationalist outlook. He upheld the centrality of the Arabic language and the principle of Arab solidarity, viewing unity as essential to confronting fragmentation and foreign intervention. From this perspective, he was uncomfortable with certain aspects of the literary magazine Shi'r, particularly what he perceived as its openness to colloquial Arabic and its political and cultural positions.
Rana clarifies that her father’s reservations were not a blanket judgment on all the magazine’s contributors, but rather an expression of differences in cultural and political outlook. These disagreements reflected a broader debate that characterized Arab literary life at the time, when questions of poetic form and language were inseparable from discussions of identity, renaissance, and the role of culture in the Arab project.
Arabic Fiction at the Heart of the Publishing Project
After 1958, Dar Al-Adab turned more decisively toward Arabic fiction, expanding its commitment to emerging voices and works that sought to express the region’s social and political transformations.
Rana Idriss recalls the publication of works by Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, and Ghada al-Samman, alongside novels by Hanna Mina, whose books achieved considerable popularity. The publishing house also published works by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and other writers who helped shape modern Arabic fiction.
The house’s success was not limited to the literary merit of its publications; it was also connected to its ability to reach a broad readership. Rana cites print runs that illustrate the popularity of certain authors. Hanna Mina’s books, she notes, were initially printed in thousands of copies, with successive editions following. Some of Colin Wilson’s works reached print runs of 10,000 copies.
These figures reveal a period when literary and intellectual books could attract substantial public interest, and when publishing houses played an important role in bringing ideas and intellectual movements beyond the confines of relatively small academic and cultural circles.
Nevertheless, the publishing house’s intellectual commitments were not entirely detached from the political positions of the authors it published. Suheil Idriss decided to stop publishing Sartre’s books because of what he considered the French writer’s negative stance on Palestine. The publishing house returned to issuing his works only later, after this decision was reconsidered.
This episode illustrates how the founder’s publishing choices were guided not merely by commercial considerations but also by political and ethical principles, even when they involved major literary and intellectual figures.
Palestine and War: When Books Become Targets
The history of Dar Al-Adab cannot be separated from the wars that have affected Lebanon and the wider region. The family suffered significant losses during Israeli attacks when Israeli aircraft bombed its home in 1978, destroying Suheil Idriss’s personal library. The collection included books bearing dedications from some of the most prominent writers and thinkers of the time, including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Régis Debray, Naguib Mahfouz, and Youssef al-Sibai. Much of the publishing house’s archive had already been lost during the events of 1958.
Rana recalls her father’s grief over the destruction of his library and the publishing house’s subsequent move to the Sakiat al-Janzir district. During those years, family life and cultural work were closely intertwined. The family home and the publishing house were sometimes directly opposite each other, and Aida Matrji continued translating and working while caring for her children. At times, her professional commitments even overshadowed ordinary domestic routines.
Rana recounts an amusing incident involving the poet Nizar Qabbani, who visited the publishing house and was asked to wait until she had finished breastfeeding her daughter. He jokingly replied: “Am I in a nursery?”
Behind these everyday memories, however, lay a cultural enterprise struggling under the pressure of war. When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, anxiety grew and publishing output declined. Ensuring that Al-Adab continued to appear in Beirut became one of its founder’s principal concerns.
Following the advice of several friends, Suheil Idriss eventually agreed to publish the magazine from Baghdad in an attempt to preserve its continuity away from the violence. The experiment proved short-lived: only one issue was published outside Lebanon, owing to the extensive censorship pressures the magazine encountered.
Throughout these years, Palestine remained more than a recurring subject in articles and books. It was central to the political and ethical outlook that informed a significant part of the publishing house’s editorial choices. The war also exposed the vulnerability of cultural institutions to violence and demonstrated that, under certain circumstances, simply continuing to publish could itself become a form of cultural resistance.
Rana Idriss and Renewal: A New Generation at the Helm
In 1986, Rana Idriss returned from the United States at her father’s request, having spent five years preparing for her doctorate. Suheil Idriss believed the publishing house needed fresh energy, particularly as her brother Samah was preparing to attend Columbia University and her sister Raida had married and moved to the United States.
Rana returned with new ideas about publishing, drawing on her experience in America and her observations of global cultural developments. Japanese literature was among the fields that particularly captured her attention, at a time when interest in Japanese culture was growing in New York.
She recalls discussing with her father the need to understand the Japanese experience, especially its ability to reconcile tradition and modernity. She proposed a series of fifteen Japanese novels, and the idea became a publishing project. Suheil Idriss translated Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, while Aida Matrji translated Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Further works of Japanese literature subsequently appeared in Arabic.
This initiative was more than a geographical expansion of the publishing house’s translation list. It was an attempt to broaden Arab readers’ horizons beyond the familiar European literary traditions and introduce them to a different cultural experience, with its own perspectives on the world, the individual, and modernity.
The project also illustrates the relationship between generations within Dar Al-Adab. The founder established its intellectual and professional foundations, while his daughter sought to modernize its methods and expand its publishing horizons without abandoning the heritage on which the institution had been built.
From Ahlam Mosteghanemi to Changes in the Reading Market
In recounting the publishing house’s history, Rana Idriss highlights the phenomenon of Ahlam Mosteghanemi, whose novel Memory in the Flesh achieved widespread popularity across the Arab world from the late 1980s onward. She considers Mosteghanemi’s success comparable, in certain respects, to the mass appeal enjoyed by the poet Nizar Qabbani.
Rana observes that authors capable of achieving a similar level of popularity have become less evident in subsequent years. She also acknowledges the success of Elif Shafak, particularly with her novel The Forty Rules of Love, while distinguishing the success of an individual book from the emergence of an Arab writer who becomes a widely recognized and enduring phenomenon in the book market.
Her observations raise broader questions about the changing relationship between readers and books, as well as transformations in distribution, marketing, and literary celebrity. A novel’s success no longer depends solely on its artistic merit; it is also influenced by promotional strategies, changing reading habits, and growing competition between printed books and digital platforms.
Dar Al-Adab’s experience therefore offers more than a nostalgic look at a successful past. It also raises questions about the future of Arab publishing and the ability of independent publishing houses to maintain their presence in a changing market without compromising the literary and intellectual standards that established their reputations.
Seven Decades of Culture and Memory
The history of Dar Al-Adab offers a model of a cultural institution shaped by the intersection of literature, politics, and translation, and one that has remained part of the Arab intellectual landscape for decades. From a magazine that engaged with the renewal of poetry to a publishing house that championed Arabic fiction and translated works from diverse cultures, its trajectory has been closely connected to questions of freedom, identity, language, and intellectual commitment.
Rana Idriss’s recollections also demonstrate that the survival of cultural institutions depends on more than inherited prestige. It requires the transmission of experience between generations and the ability to adapt to change without losing sight of foundational principles. The project begun by Suheil Idriss and Aida Matrji did not remain confined to the choices of its historical moment. Instead, it expanded to embrace new literary experiences and respond to changing reader preferences and interests.
Seventy years on, Dar Al-Adab remains a witness to an important chapter in the history of Arab publishing and to the capacity of books to transcend the boundaries of cultural luxury and become instruments of reflection, dialogue, and intellectual formation. Between the institution’s accumulated legacy and the challenges facing the publishing industry today, the central question remains how established cultural institutions can preserve their role while continuing to discover new voices and open up previously unexplored horizons.
Ultimately, this is the story of a family that made books an integral part of its life, and of an institution that sought to make culture a space for engaging with the world rather than merely a repository of published works. Between the memory of seven decades and the aspirations of new generations, Dar Al-Adab continues to test its ability to renew its mission in an Arab cultural landscape where institutions remain essential to preserving collective memory and creating opportunities for the future.
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