Khaberni - Last Wednesday evening, the critic and writer Saeed al-Surayhi passed away at the age of seventy-three, after a long career that left a significant mark in literary criticism and Arab culture, contributing through his books and studies to opening new paths for reading and analyzing literary texts with a method that combines philosophical knowledge and social vision.
Al-Surayhi was born in Jeddah in 1953, and his intellectual personality was formed in a culturally diverse environment, before continuing his academic studies in Arabic language until he earned a Ph.D., presenting his thesis "Innovation in Poetic Language among Modern Poets in the Abbasid Era," which, upon its release, sparked a wide discussion in critical circles and later became an important reference in the study of transformations in Arabic poetic language.
Al-Surayhi's name was associated with several publications that formed landmarks in the path of contemporary Arab criticism, known for his ability to read texts outside traditional templates and deconstruct cultural structures behind them, in addition to his strong presence in journalistic memory through his long experience at Okaz newspaper, where he spent nearly three decades supervising, editing, and writing a daily column, during which he contributed to consolidating the presence of the cultural page and enhancing intellectual discussion in the Saudi press.
Among the most prominent of Saeed al-Surayhi's critical works are "Writing Outside the Brackets: Studies in Poetry and Narrative," in which he presented critical approaches to a number of poetic and narrative experiences, and the book "Stirring the Logs on the Fire: Studies in Narrative," which dealt with the transformations of Arab narrative and its aesthetic and intellectual questions. In "The Veil of Custom: Archaeology of Generosity from Discourse to Experience," he provided an in-depth cultural reading of the concept of generosity in Arab culture, tracing its historical roots and social transformations, while his book "The Temptation of the Name: The Biography of Coffee and the Discourse of Prohibition" elicited widespread interest thanks to his handling of the relationship between social habits, religious discourse, and culture through the model of coffee in Arab history. In his intellectual biography "Life Outside the Brackets," he published a text that combines personal narrative and cultural reflection, documenting milestones from his intellectual and human experience.
