EducationB

Dr. Dahesh
Writer & Philosopher

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Dr. Dahesh is a prodigious writer, and a self-made man. The only formal education he received was during the few months he spent in an orphanage in the town of Ghazir, in Lebanon. He was then only eleven years old. However, he managed, through his unique talents and gifts, to climb to the peak of literary achievement, having written over one hundred and fifty works which won the admiration of researchers, were translated into the major international languages, and became the subject of graduate study and research in some Arab countries, as well as in France, and the United States.

Art and literature are two major interests that occupied Dr. Dahesh during his lifetime. His deep interest in literature and other cultural aspects including art began in the tender years. Since childhood, he had a rare fondness and enthusiasm for knowledge in all its different fields. Through his personal efforts, he managed to collect his own private library containing over two hundred thousand books, written in the different international languages, as well as most of the Arab daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers over tens of years.

Dr. Dahesh's great love for the fine arts emanated from his belief that art is one of the major premises of any advanced civilization as well as a measure of human progress. His early collection was purchased through correspondence to different parts of the world, but specially Europe. Hundreds, yet thousands of letters were exchanged seeking artworks for sale or commissioning specific subjects from his very own ideas and vivid imagination. Several of these commissioned artworks were used as illustrations for his literary creations. Later, during his travels, Dr. Dahesh frequented museums and galleries, purchased many pieces of art, thus adding to his collection, which comprises approximately two thousand paintings, hundreds of sculptures and other decorative works of art now belonging to the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York City.

Dr. Dahesh is however best known for his humanistic views and spiritual guidance that calls for equality of humankind and the unity of religions through the understanding of spiritual laws, Divine justice, reincarnation, just deserts and freedom of choice. His message explains the purity of religions and how people can be brought together regardless of their differences through restoring faith in the essence of religion. The unique spiritual gifts through which Dr. Dahesh was able to carry out supernatural spiritual phenomena, captivated the minds of researchers, and had their repercussions in the press, in Egypt and Lebanon, for many decades. Dr. Dahesh's ideas concerning reform, his teachings, and his extraordinary spiritual abilities led many skeptics to be restored to their true faith in God.

Dr. Dahesh is a great writer who has had a profound influence on many readers. His books are characterized by breadth and diversity, constituting a comprehensive and integrated spiritual vision encompassing the meaning of life and death; and defining differences between human beings in terms of health, perceptive abilities, and tendencies, whether they are virtuous or vicious. They shed light on the causes of wars and the mass psychology of peoples; and reveal the secrets of the lives of animals, plants and objects, as well as the universal civilization inhabiting millions of planets that rotate in the spheres of the galaxies.

Dr. Dahesh was born on the first of June 1909, in Jerusalem, the land of divine inspiration, and the birthplace of prophets. As a child, he traveled with his family to Beirut where he obtained the Lebanese citizenship. His father died while he was still a child of eleven years, and he was brought up as an orphan.

In his childhood, he carried out strange phenomena, which baffled all those who knew him; and these astonishing phenomena increased and became more prominent as he got older.

Between the years 1942 and 1944, he gained fame and his ideas began to spread. The increasing number of supporters and those who embraced his teachings alarmed the Lebanese authorities who unduly persecuted him. The government deprived him of his Lebanese citizenship in 1944, and exiled him from Lebanon without trial and without legal justification. However, he returned secretly to Beirut, and waged against his enemies a relentless pen war. He wrote defending his usurped rights and his forfeited liberty until he aroused the people against the government, eventually leading them to overthrow the oppressive regime in 1952. He then regained his Lebanese citizenship of which he had unjustly been deprived.

In 1969, Dr. Dahesh resumed his travels around the world, which lasted until the summer of 1983. He visited the Arab countries as well as the capitals and large cities of Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. He recorded his views of each country he visited and of its people and their traditions; and described its architecture and civilization, stating his genuine impressions in a diverting and accurate descriptive style, in a series consisting of 22 volumes entitled Dr. Dahesh's Journeys Around The World.

Despite numerous difficulties, and the instability of traveling from place to place, he was able to write tens of other books within the different literary genres; and he managed to be creative in each genre whether in the novel, or meditative writing, or social criticism; and whether his work comprised a detailed description of human emotions, or nature, or the joys of heaven, or the horrors of hell...

It is worth noting that his novel entitled Memoirs of a Dinar, whose narrative events cover the greater part of the twentieth century, ends in a comprehensive vision of an overall extinction of life. The same is true of his exciting collection of short stores entitled Strange Stories and Wonderful Tales, which consists of four volumes.

Many Arab writers and poets, who were full of admiration for Dr. Dahesh's writings, undertook to rewrite them into fascinating poems. For example, the scholar Sheikh Abdullah el-Alaili rendered volume I of The Inferno of Dr. Dahesh, in verse; and the poet Mutlaq Abdul Khaleq versified The Repose of Death; and the poet Halim Dammous reproduced in rhymed verse a large number of Dr. Dahesh's writings.

It is also worth noting that most of Dr. Dahesh's books are characterized by their elegant print, their glossy paper, and the exquisite artistic paintings by which they are ornamented; and that adds to their useful and edifying content, and also to their amusing and pleasurable effect.