Reflections on ‘The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple’
Reflections on ‘The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple’
By Dana Al Shahbari
Over a century ago, Lebanese-Palestinian writer May Ziadeh (1886-1941) boarded a steam train from Beirut to Baalbek and returned not only with a memory, but with a vision. “Dhikrā Qalʿat Baʿlabak” ( The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple) was written in late 1911 and published in al-Zuhūr journal in 1912, before being reprinted in her 1922 collection Sawāniḥ Fatāt. The essay engages in a rich dialogue with Arabic literary tradition, Baalbek’s ancient past, and its early twentieth-century present. In this travelogue-turned-meditation, Ziadeh creatively revives the pre-Islamic motif of al-bukāʾ ʿalā al-aṭlāl (standing before the ruins), famously exemplified in Imru’ al-Qays’s Muʿallaqa, to contemplate questions of identity, memory, and ruin —a motif that would go on to shape later works of Lebanese fiction. And Baalbek, the city of ruins, becomes the setting for this experiment. Writing in response to her time, Ziadeh’s reflections reveal an early decolonial perspective taking shape within a national discourse that critiques the manipulation of Eastern heritage and lands by foreign powers.
Ziadeh’s account serves both as a personal memoir and a testament to a historical moment when train travel in Lebanon was a lived reality. This reality, now distant and unimaginable, lingers in the collective national memory as the scattered remnants of a once-thriving network that connected cities across Palestine, Syria, and Europe. Aboard the train, the topography of Lebanon unfolds before Ziadeh’s eyes in fleeting glimpses; she is ascending to the highest peaks one moment, descending into the Bekaa Valley the next. Along this journey, Ziadeh records and captures the essence of change brought by industrialization, conveying a cautious engagement with modernity and its machine(s). The journey resists being a simple domestic train ride from Beirut to Baalbek; the train, its smoke, and the entangled history of the city and its ruins all gesture toward the smallness of humans humbled before fate, nature, and the relentless passage of time.
As the ṭayf (specter) of the city begins to emerge from the train, Ziadeh describes the ruins as lamenting their fate, calling passersby to witness their sorrow. It is a moment when a modern self confronts an ancient site. Upon entering the temple, Ziadeh kneels and weeps before the ruins. Though the genre of expression is new, ruins continue to serve their classical symbolic role as sites of loss, nostalgia, and identity in Ziadeh’s work. Her engagement with Baalbek and its ruins reflects larger concerns about cultural heritage, national identity, and coloniality. Following the currents of Romantic writing, Ziadeh uses Baalbek’s scattered glory to meditate on universal questions of time, power, and human frailty. Through this lens, the ruins cease to be merely ruined; instead, they become a charged stage for existential truths and reflections on the ephemerality of humans, the limits of their knowledge, and the inevitability of decay. The legacy of Baalbek lives on as a paradoxical site of greatness that nonetheless mostly perished.
Her critique, however, is not merely nostalgic. Writing in response to her time, Ziadeh’s reflections reveal an early decolonial perspective enacted by being present among the ruins, deeply attuned to the manipulation of Eastern heritage and lands by foreign powers. The symbolic presence of yad al-gharīb—the hand of the stranger—looms over her prose. In particular, the stairs installed by German archaeologists in 1905 are noted as a violation of sanctity under the guise of preservation. These interventions become metaphors for Western greed and cultural domination. While the hand of the stranger in Ziadeh’s time sought to dominate and interfere, today it takes a far more violent form, with Israeli bombs posing an overt threat to Baalbek’s historical structures and cultural memory.
The same ruins Ziadeh mourned and memorialized over a century ago still stand today, but they now face the threat of complete destruction following the escalation of the Israeli war on Lebanon since September 2024. As Al Jazeera reported in November 2024, there was “destruction at the site of an overnight Israeli air attack on Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek, in the vicinity of the ancient Roman ruins of Heliopolis,” underscoring in their report the precarious state of Baalbek’s heritage, which faces renewed threats of erasure. The poetics of ruins and Ziadeh’s textual narrative in “Dhikrā Qalʿat Baʿlabak” gain added significance as the ruins become political sites of resistance through memorializing history and creating a space for collective reflection and resilience. The collective concern for the ruins is mirrored in today’s social media campaigns under hashtags like “All Eyes on Baalbek” and “Hands Off Baalbek,” echoing Ziadeh’s plea to leave the people, their land and its soils, and the temple untouched. Her decolonial voice, which warned of Western greed, proves its lasting significance since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, through the Nakba in 1948, and into today’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Despite the persistent threats and destruction, the six columns of Baalbek’s ruins serve as active markers of ancient history worth protecting from the strangers’ hand(s). They remain tropes of hope amid ruination — and despite it.
Rereading Ziadeh today reveals Baalbek as a significant literary locus of fractured glory, Phoenician mythical reincarnation, and philosophical contemplation in a region cyclically threatened by war, religious and cultural conflicts, and colonial intervention. “Dhikrā Qalʿat Baʿlabak” defies strict categorization by existing at the intersection of multiple literary traditions from a personal, autobiographical point of view. The rhetorical and stylistic richness of her writing, coupled with her intertextual engagement with adab al-riḥla and al bukāʾʿalā al-aṭlāl, all foreground a sophisticated literary experiment that revives established literary forms in a modern motion of travel and being within an Arabic Romantic framework. “Dhikrā Qalʿat Baʿlabak” playfully and masterfully inverts the conventional framework of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda, which traditionally unfolds in the sequence of nasīb (separation), raḥīl (journey), and fakhr (self-praise). Ziadeh’s prose, notably divided into three sections, follows a reversed trajectory: it begins with raḥīl as she recounts her train journey, moves into nasīb as she weeps before the ruins, and concludes with a mix of rithāʾ (elegy) and fakhr, where she transforms the grief over Baalbek’s glorious ruins into a meditation on (de)colonial histories, modern identities, and universal human conditions during the nascent years of the twentieth century and Ziadeh’s literary debut to the Arab/ic scene in 1911.
Translating this piece today is not simply a literary offering—it is an urgent return. A return to the voice of a young woman whose reflections on ruins, cultural memory, and colonial violence remain hauntingly relevant. And a return to Baalbek itself, whose ancient stones that once mourned silently beneath Ziadeh’s steps now tremble again under the threat of Israeli bombs. This translation insists, as she once did, that ruins still speak. That mourning is not the opposite of resistance, but one of its fiercest, oldest forms. And that we must listen.
Read: ‘The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple’
Dana Al Shahbari is a PhD student in Modern Arabic Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the recovery of May Ziadeh through archival work, critically reassessing and reclaiming Ziadeh’s intellectual contribution to Arab literary history through scholarship and translation.