To the women of the “Seventh Day” forum in Jerusalem

Has anything changed between 2019 and 2025 so that Adwan Nimr Adwan’s novel “The Return of the Morisco from His Sighs” passed through the “Seventh Day” women’s forum without any uproar? A novel containing scenes that speakers at the time described as highly sexual or extremely bold. Has the cultural community become more conscious, accepting, and tolerant of such topics? I hope the intellectuals—especially the “women of the forum”—have matured enough to cease their wrongdoing and accusations against writers.

What happened in 2019?
A group of “women in the Seventh Day forum” announced they would boycott the scheduled seminar to discuss my poetry collection “What Resembles Elegy” in protest at a poetic line described as "obscene to public modesty," while Adwan’s novel passed quietly and peacefully, received with welcome despite having—even after deletions by author Walid Abu Bakr—doses of “explicit literature” enough to qualify “the forum women” as arbiters of virtue to fall apart. They launched a “vicious campaign” against the novel to block its discussion—or even to announce their refusal to participate. But none of this happened.

Nuzha Al‑Ramlawi, leading the women’s flock at the time, participated in the novel discussion held on Thursday, June 24, 2025; she did not express any objection—neither remotely—about scenes that were supposed to be “indecent” and “obscene to public modesty.” Alongside Al‑Ramlawi, of course, were Rafiqa Osman and Nuzha Abu Ghosh, both part of the inciting chorus in 2019; this year they lavishly praised the novel and did not object to the “extreme breaches of modesty” in it.

Even more surprising this year was the participation of researcher Mariam Ghassan Al‑Masri—a student of Adwan at university—who declared she wished the novel had not been “tamed,” and that those scenes remained; she calls them “very romantic passages,” and even says: “If those passages had remained, the novel would unquestionably have been more beautiful.” Undoubtedly, “very romantic passages” is a gentle, appealing phrase—not inciting—and that’s what Mariam chose to describe those sexual scenes in the novel. Her view raises the following question:

Is there a difference between me and Adwan Adwan? Because he’s a university lecturer and I’m an “educational supervisor,” does that entitle a lecturer to “violate public modesty” but deny this right to me? Assuming we all—Adwan, I, and all writers—have breached public modesty. It seems that the “academic authority of the university” helped to shield Adwan’s creative writing, even though his work at the university among students, and the promotion of his novel among them, could be interpreted as incitement to vice and its dissemination. This kind of literature flows among deprived students in the height of sexual controversy and desire, and among beautiful, well-dressed female students. According to the logic of “the women of the forum,” such a novel fuels the fire of college lust! Yet none of this happened with Adwan—why might that be?

Is Adwan’s political affiliation another shield for him—he is one of the “sons of al-Asfar” aligned with the ruling faction controlling us—thus granting him creative endorsements from his followers and minions, while issuing death sentences for others who do not belong to that faction like me? Thus they hold “unjust trials,” issuing threats, denying them writing platforms. We do not support the government, and even curse its policies, which have impoverished the people economically and spiritually—“we entered the stinking security lizard’s hole”—they put us on a "Black List." In this logic, Adwan is a great writer and creator; I am merely a troublemaker and adventurer, which means “the label of literature” is stripped from me and my writing, to force me into the corner of “lack of decency.”

The challenge reaches its peak in the novel when the author chooses a passage for the back cover that would fall under “violating public modesty” by the forum’s standards. Such promotional literary excerpts play multiple critical roles: publicity, marketing, luring readers. The text reads:

"Once I asked him about love, and he answered: Love is the soul’s desire, and sex is the body’s desire, and the best they are is when they become one flesh. I asked him: How is that? He carried a stone and said to me: Bring me another stone, and pointed to it. It was black flint stone. He held both and said: Neither has value apart from the other. He struck one against the other and they produced sparks, and he said: With these sparks you could light the world. These two are love and sex: separate beings with no hope, and when they meet they ignite everything around them and set the world free."

Indeed, there is no taboo in choosing any text for the back cover, but one must not forget the accompanying intentions—they are not entirely innocent of personal motives, especially for a new writer whose first novel entered the “club of the novel” in 2010. He has a strong desire to be read—and he clearly expressed some of that desire during his talk at the end of the seminar, especially in his silence regarding publisher‑driven deletions. All that just so a novel of his could be published by Oghrit. Aside from the opportunism and abandonment of his writerly integrity, he was willing to pay any price to see his novel published. And what is more precious than your own creative convictions? How could he relinquish them so easily?

This opportunism was mirrored by Nafez Al‑Rifai, the former secretary‑general of the Palestinian Writers’ Union, when he wanted to recover—as he said at the seminar—the Oghrit center funded by the Norwegian government, which was paying $80,000 annually. Because he wished to write officially to the Norwegian ambassador in 2018 as Union secretary, and since the center belonged to the Union, he changed the union’s logo—removing the Kalashnikov rifles—claiming it was inappropriate that the Union’s letterhead include “Kalashnikovs,” in order to restore Oghrit. Eighty thousand dollars seems to have tempted Al‑Rifai into that venture—perhaps beyond opportunism to possible corruption; God knows. We must not cast stones in the dark, but I believe none of us are saints or prophets to prevent such possibilities.

Mahmoud Shuqqeir, in speaking about the novel, praised its “sexual scenes,” saying they were not “forced” into the text, but employed “intelligently” “without seeking titillation.” He sees the interweaving of love with sex as excellent—he borrows the author’s metaphor of flint stones: when they spark together, they could burn the world. Shuqqeir’s perspective is important: it affirms love’s human nature and the necessity of spiritual‑physical union between lovers. This issue is central in philosophy, as I’ve discussed in The Book of Letters—without sex there is no love; any sexual‑free love is simply “friendship,” as Malikah Muqaddam puts it. A love without sex is mere pastime; if someone has loved, they have experienced immersion, otherwise all is hollow “laughter for laughter,” worthless in the marketplace of relationships.

But the important question: Why wasn’t Mahmoud Shuqqeir’s praise of sexual nuance in “What Resembles Elegy” construed as incitement to violate societal modesty norms or promote indecency among literary circles? Why didn’t “the women of the forum” object to that public endorsement of loving–sexual relations? Not one woman among them rushed to defend the battered face of public modesty in that seminar—they wrapped its wounds with flattery and cosmetics of hypocritical writing.

Not only Shuqqeir, but writer Nafez Al‑Rifai too, praised the courage of Adwan, his trespass of the three taboos—sex, religion, and politics—calling it “great blasphemy.” Shuqqeir and Rifai enjoy literary immunity and wield great influence that protects them from criticism and from being boxed into “indecency.” They remained silent about what happened to me in 2019—they didn’t utter a soft or harsh word about literature, its nature, or the writer’s freedom. In 2025 they now glorify the sexual scenes and place them properly—they regard them as natural, necessary, artistic.

Does what “the Seventh Day forum women” did—those who incited against me in 2019, then praised “The Return of the Morisco” this year—constitute a kind of “cultural hypocrisy” or an unforgivable “cultural crime”?

On the sidelines of a literary meeting held in Ramallah on July 15, 2025, I met the engineer Hamdi Al‑Zughaier, the moderator of the forum’s electronic rhythm, and we discussed the Seventh Day forum and my refusal to participate in its events despite watching them later on YouTube or reading them in the newspapers. I confirmed to the novelist Dima Al‑Saman during a long session after the seminar that one reason for my non-participation was this “cultural hypocrisy.” Now I recall an important aspect of this hypocrisy during the discussion of “The Return of the Morisco,” and I remember many people refrained from attending the evenings organized to discuss my books: among them were Shuqqeir, Al‑Rifai, and Safi Safi.

I hope this is not interpreted as hostility toward the venerable Seventh Day forum in Jerusalem—there’s no need for me to credentials my love for this forum. But there are rampant diseases in cultural life in general; certainly they will affect the forum, whether we like it or not. Nor should it be construed as incitement against my university colleague Adwan Adwan and his novel; this is merely a search for the “cultural justice” lacking among intellectual circles, and for writers not to shift their glasses, hearts, or minds depending on the author’s affiliations, orientation, or position.

At the end of this writing, a question for Dr. Safi Safi, who advised me recently—on the margins of that last Ramallah seminar—to stay away from people: Can one avoid collapse amid such cultural hypocrisy and cultural crime? Although I am not “personal,” Dr. Safi, and with him a host of pale‑yellow neutral intellectuals, love to describe me as “personalizing things,” how can a writer write about such “cultural sensitivity” without naming names? Is it possible to write about a phenomenon like “the Seventh Day phenomenon” without mentioning some of its participants or some of its cultural distortions? This phenomenon is only one of them.

Firas Haj Muhammad | Palestine