Amin Ma`aluf’s Life and Creativity

Abstract

The article contains a brief overview of the life and activity of Amin Ma`aluf (February 25, 1949), a Catholic Arab in Beirut, Levanon. He got his primary, secondary and higher education at a French school and university in Beirut. He began his literary career as an editor of a local newspa-per, “An-Nahar” in Beirut. Due to the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1975 and the out break of civil war in Beirut, Maluf remained in France as a refugee forever. How-ever he continued to work as a journalist for Al-Nahar newspaper while living in France. Athough his mother tongue was Arabic, he wrote his works in French. He made history as a writer who com-bined the events thet he narrated in many of his novels with historical fiction. Amin Ma`aluf, as a famous writer, managed to make the reader fall in love with interesting historical events in the form of a philosophical tale of a fictional perspective. The relevance of A. Ma`aluf`s works at present is his modern approach to hictorical events. The ideological sources of the events that took place and its connection with the Oriental values are compared in Amin Ma`aluf works. Amin Ma`aluf`s charm stems from his devotion to the traditions of Oriental aesthetic style and Western rationaism. Although he, in the first place, addressed traditional motives and modernity in his work as a Eurpe-an scholar, he appreciated historical events as an Oriental thinker in his later research.