Rizal speaks in Arabic
The first Arabic ‘Noli Me Tangere’ challenges who owns colonial stories, and what they mean half a world away.
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The first Arabic ‘Noli Me Tangere’ challenges who owns colonial stories, and what they mean half a world away.
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For the first time, Dr. Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, the 19th-century novel that helped define Philippine identity, will be read in Arabic.
The Philippine Embassy in Iraq recently marked the milestone, unveiling a translation that opens Rizal’s critique of colonial society to more than 400 million Arabic speakers worldwide.
The launch coincided with a reception commemorating 50 years of Philippine-Iraq diplomatic relations.
Ambassador Charlie Pacaña Manangan, a Knight of Rizal, greeted Iraqi government officials, members of the diplomatic corps, academics, representatives of cultural heritage groups.
The translation itself was undertaken by Prof. Dr. Reyadh Mahdi Jasim Al-Najjar of the University of Baghdad, bridging centuries, continents, and cultures in a meticulous rendering of Rizal’s Spanish prose. A manuscript was formally turned over to the Iraqi government, represented by deputy foreign minister Dr. Hisham Al-Alawi, while diplomats and cultural leaders, including Spain’s ambassador to Iraq and the Philippine honorary consul to Kurdistan, observed.
For the Philippines, the project signals more than literary achievement as a gesture of shared human experience, of histories resonating across languages, of soft power exercised through art and ideas rather than politics alone.
Copies of the Arabic Noli Me Tangere are expected to circulate in 2026, carrying Rizal’s warnings, insights, vision into a new cultural landscape.
