Who is Osama Al-Musallam?

I am not the only one who asked the above question to his friends and acquaintances last Saturday evening in the atmosphere of the International Book Fair in Rabat. Rather, I found many people I know puzzled, and we were greatly astonished at our ignorance of the owner of this name, who was the star of the most important event, not only at the fair, but also in… Also on social media, and in the chats of countless people, after the Moroccan security authorities, in consultation with the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication and the exhibition management, took the initiative to stop the ceremony of Osama Al-Musallam signing his books for the public in the pavilion of the (Dar) Center for Arab Literature for Publishing and Distribution (based in Dammam). ), after intense crowding in the place, a stampede and widespread chaos, with thousands of young men (and non-young men) of both sexes flocking to the pavilion, to obtain the author’s signature on purchased copies. Many people appreciated this security initiative, which was due to a well-placed fear that something bad would happen, God forbid. As I announce, here, that I hear, for the first time in my life, of this young writer (born in 1977), I feel extremely embarrassed, as it is a purely professional, media duty, including cultural media, that the name of Osama Al-Muslim have reached my ears, even if I had not read Whether or not I have come across a text or book by him. What alleviates the embarrassment that I felt when I was with a group of friends, in Rabat, where these lines are written, is that many others are in the same situation as me. They did not know anything about this writer, who we now know has 17 novels, some of which are in five parts or less, which means that he has about 30 books. It is amazing that he wrote and published them in the past nine years, and that the editions of his books continue and run out in months. When we read that (only) one of his novels had sold about 150,000 copies, and when we were told that a large crowd kept flocking to the signing ceremony for his books at the Cairo International Book Fair months ago, from the afternoon until late at night, our question about who Osama Al-Muslim was was an indication. To the point that we are in a world other than the world in which we live our lives and livelihood and carry out our concerns, other than the one in which we engage in our readings and writings. We are the people of media and writing who reside outside the social and cultural space to which Osama Al-Muslim and his audience belong.
It was decided to advance the signing date of the (famous) Saudi writer by two hours from what was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. The management of the book fair in Rabat announced that it was a record day in the number of visitors, and unprecedented, as it reached 23 thousand, while the previous day (Friday) was eight thousand, which made It cannot be attributed only to it being a holiday, but the event of Osama Al-Muslim’s arrival (with his bodyguards!) to the exhibition could be added as another likely reason. Thus, we are not faced with a passing incident, but rather an issue, or a phenomenon, whose name is Osama Al-Muslim. What we have come to know about the successive editions of his books, the speed of their running out, and the huge demand for them, and some of which the author of these lines saw at the Rabat exhibition, and which witnesses from the Cairo exhibition told us, is this. All of it puts us in a state of confusion if we make some comparisons between what a Muslim has achieved and what Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish were like in the stages of their poetic performances, in terms of popularity in a past era. One of us might add to this and say that it is the effectiveness of social media, and the influential social media, which has unlimited authority, and which elevates the status of so-and-so or public, in more than one field… And here we are in front of a star named Osama Al-Musallam, had it not been for what happened in Rabat, he would not have We, along with many friends like me, knew something about his stardom, and we did not rush to Google to find out about him. We have come to know that he is a writer of fairy tale-like fantasy stories, interesting, as they said, simple and superficial, in which he travels to ancient history, myths, wars, love stories, goblins, humans, jinn, science fiction, and mixtures of all of this in successive series of books called novels.
Many of the young Moroccan women who came to the exhibition in Rabat regretted that they were not able to meet Osama Al-Musallam, take pictures with him, and obtain his signature on their copies of his books. Some of them said that their favorite writer was the one who pushed them to love reading and learning. …And with this I conclude the lines of this article.