by Yahia Lababidi.
I was a teenager in Cairo, Egypt, when a family friend paused mid-conversation, studying me with a curious smile. “You,” he said, half teasing, “are like a Jewish intellectual.” It wasn’t a provocation, though it might have sounded like one in certain company in a Muslim-majority country. I received it as praise. Even then, I felt a deep kinship with that tradition: its moral intensity and reverence for study, and the courage each of those things demands.
When the stories of the Hebrew prophets first reached me, Moses stirred something I could not yet name. The idea of someone who stuttered when speaking to men but found clarity when speaking to God gave me courage. As a fledgling writer, I sensed that literature and faith mirrored each other. As a cultural Muslim, the Qur’an was everywhere—in the streets, in our traditions and speech. But I also derived secret sustenance from the likes of Blake and Gibran, Tagore and the Bible. The prophets lived among us, in Scripture and in story: Moses parting the sea of conscience, Muhammad retreating into silence before revelation became responsibility. They were living echoes, calling us inward, insisting we listen. In Egypt, as we lived side by side with our ancient ruins, the prophets seemed to be our contemporaries.
Before I had words for it, I was drawn to the prophetic temperament, to the elevated demands it made on human nature and its insistence that we answer to what is highest in us. I respected, too, the prophets themselves: their high-minded rebellion against man-made laws, how they were never afraid to disturb the peace when peace was a lie. I was inspired by the great love and pity they had for us when we strayed, how they stood at the gates of cities and wept.
My early intuitions were clarified by prophetic writers such as Gibran and Blake, for whom vision meant divine nearness, placing an infinite claim upon us. Later, in Buber, I could see how relation became revelation. Or in Heschel, the trembling scribe of divine sorrow, who wrote, “The prophet is a person who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul . . .” Susceptible to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra early on, I longed to understand how one might align oneself with such grand truths, so that one might be transformed by them and overcome what was limiting.
What I admired was inner bearing. These figures, whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or somewhere in between, shared a fidelity to truth that placed them at odds with their own communities. They refused to flatter society or power, choosing the harder loyalty instead: that of the conscience. It left them exposed and unforgettable.
Raised Muslim, I was taught to honor all prophets. The Qur’an teaches: “We make no distinction between any of them.” Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, each entrusted with a light for his time and his people. Reverence for one never required rejection of the others. Instead, it demanded recognition of a single thread woven through history: the moral voice that returns, again and again, when we stray too far. As a young man, I found this plural inheritance spacious and liberating. It still seems so.
My grandfather Yahya, for whom I am named, was claimed by vocation. Born in Beirut in 1900, he left dentistry at music’s insistence. When the Palestine Broadcasting Service was founded in Jerusalem in 1936, he was appointed subdirector of its Arabic music section, where he worked alongside the celebrated Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan. Together they composed the patriotic, social, and religious songs that filled the air of Mandatory Palestine, among them the anthems “Nashid al-Alam” and “Nashid al-Watan al-Arabi,” and “Ashwaq al-Hijaz,” written for Palestinian pilgrims crossing into the Hijaz on hajj. When the British authorities sought to relocate the station to Cyprus during the war years and offered him large sums to agree to it, he refused. He insisted Palestine Radio remain in Jerusalem, where it broadcast until the city was bombed in 1948. He gave himself wholly to that work. He died in 1943; my father was still a child when he lost him, and I never knew him at all. I carry his name and have often felt that something of what he entrusted to art reached me as temperament, an inheritance needing no introduction because it precedes memory.
My grandmother Rabiha, who founded the women’s section of Al-Quds Radio in Jerusalem and was among its first Arab broadcasters, displaced from Jerusalem in 1948, came from the old Dajani family, and through her, I inherited a story that joined prophecy to place. In our family memory, the Sufi sheikh Ahmad al-Dajani was called to Jerusalem by a waking vision of the Prophet David, whose tomb on Mount Zion had fallen into neglect and dispute. Sultan Suleiman is said to have entrusted Sheikh Ahmad and his descendants with its care, and for generations the Dajani Daoudis served as custodians of that shrine, until the loss of Jerusalem in 1948 severed that charge. I came to understand this inheritance as a reminder that the sacred must be tended and that prophets belong to more than one people.
Rabiha lived this. A decade before the Nakba (the Arabic for “catastrophe”; specifically, it refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948) drove her from her ancestral home at gunpoint, she was in those same streets of Jerusalem, collecting donations for the Palestinian revolutionaries: a young woman who understood, before catastrophe made it plain, that the sacred must also be defended.
What continued to move me was the prophets’ spiritual daring and the personal risk it entailed. The way they stood apart, often alone, misunderstood even by those closest to them. I was beginning to understand that truth, when it is ultimate and absolute, always demands a price. The prophets did not wait for history to settle. They spoke of catastrophe.
In my twenties and early thirties, I worked as a speechwriter for the United Nations office in Cairo. At first, it seemed an extension of that same moral longing. Surely here, I thought, language could matter. Surely truth might be spoken with dignity. I was naïve. Yes, the offices were full of noble rhetoric, yet the language was carefully managed not to offend or, worse, contradict that of the government. Some positions were off-limits, certain facts, too, if they blatantly challenged the institutional version of reality. I came to see that neutrality, posing as diplomacy, was a form of cowardice that did violence to my nature.
Recently, encountering Peter Beinart’s brave book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, I recognized what was missing. Beinart wrote from within a tradition I did not belong to, yet I recognized something intimate in his confrontation with himself. What moved me beyond his critique of the corrupt state of Israel was his recovery of the Jewish prophetic voice, the one that warns and refuses to serve nationalism. His refusal to let spiritual inheritance be annexed by politics restored something sacred to the discourse: a Judaism capable of mourning and resisting in a higher name.
By this time, I had come to know the Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales, whose fierce tenderness steadied me. A line from her poem “Red Sea,” “This time it’s all of us or none,” said it all, really. I turned to principled rebels, such as Norman Finkelstein, exiled for his ethical logic; to Naomi Klein and Gabor Maté, whose compassion felt born of real listening. These voices reminded me that solidarity is a spiritual discipline.
When, in a daze, after the horrors of October 7, I began composing Palestine Wail, I was looking to testify. I wrote for those who had no voice left, and for those under the rubble. I returned to Qur’anic verses for orientation: Will you not reflect? Will you not stand with the oppressed? The prophets were philosophers, with hearts aflame, sent to awaken a sleeping world.
Writing, as I understood it, became a way to donate blood. To speak of Gaza in this spirit is to say what cannot be unsaid. That to slaughter an entire people is no form of defense, and to erase their memory is to kill them twice. And while writing in the face of unfathomable tragedy, I felt drawn toward a lineage of those great souls who wrote to bear witness: Darwish, who held Palestine the way one holds a wound; Jeremiah, whose tears became Scripture. And Shireen Abu Akleh, gunned down while reporting, whose funeral was attacked by those who silenced her.
These are everyday saints and secretaries of the invisible. To speak now, in their name, is to honor those who recorded what others forgot. Their reward was solitude, yet their words persist. The prophets I revere are disruptors. When necessary, they thunder, speaking from the heart of all suffering and summoning us back to mercy. To write in their name is to risk being misunderstood. It is to forfeit alliances for the sake of larger allegiances, rejoining a lineage bound by conscience rather than blood.
I realize now that I’ve always been drawn to vatic utterance, and those prophets who stood at thresholds: Job, torn between lament and defiance; the Prophet Muhammad, alone in a cave, trembling before revelation. What binds them is surrender. All too human, they trembled and questioned, and still they obeyed. It is this trembling obedience that I seek, personally, today. Faith forged in the crucible of conscience.
Tribal allegiance is the wrong question. Muslim or Jewish, native or stranger, the only questions that hold are these: What will you sanctify with your silence? What will you risk, truly risk, to speak from the heart of your tradition, especially when your faith tradition is used to excuse cruelty? We belong to one another, and integrity, when fully alive, carries no flag.
(excerpted from If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness, forthcoming from New Village Press)