Kuwait Time: By Talal Al Refai: I know full well how difficult it is to argue with a man about his passion. When an idea takes root in someone’s mind and settles firmly into place, dislodging it becomes nearly impossible — and some would sooner go to their graves than surrender a single conviction.

I follow a friend on X, Osama Al-Wasili, who surprised me on Tuesday morning, April 7, with these words: “I don’t like Fairuz mornings, and I know that makes me guilty of a crime against Arabism. I’ll go further: When I say her voice is beautiful, I am lying. Let the general taste forgive me for this graceless honesty — but my truth is that her voice sometimes resembles the call of a mother who has run out of patience with a son late for lunch.”

Mr Al-Wasili is entirely entitled to his opinion, and no one would take that from him. Yet something compels me to respond. Very few of the dreams worth dreaming have left any lasting trace. Among the most cherished of those dreams — shared by me and by countless others of my generation — was the dream of the Great Arab Nation, stretching from the Gulf to the Atlantic, a dream for which thousands of young Arabs sacrificed the finest years of their lives. Perhaps Fairuz alone, with the full weight of her artistic legacy and her boundless reach across time, remains the living remnant of that great dream.

Yes, my friend, Fairuz is not a singer. Fairuz is a Lebanese Arab artistic heritage, one that defies repetition. She is the angelic voice and the chosen word; she is the meticulously crafted melody and the performance that transcends technique to touch the soul. She is the magnificent fruit of a singular encounter with the Rahbani brothers, and with a constellation of gifted Lebanese composers who built an entire world alongside her.

Human history has taught us that no true creator — in any literary or artistic form — grows in isolation. Genius requires a nurturing environment, one that converges around it and propels it toward expression. That is precisely what Fairuz was given. And so she cannot be separated from the poetry she sings, nor detached from the melodies she inhabits, nor understood apart from the extraordinary gift she possesses: The ability to traverse vastly different musical landscapes across a remarkable range of vocal registers, delivering an emotion that asks no one’s permission before reaching the deepest chambers of the human soul. Nor can Fairuz be contemplated apart from the seismic Arab events that surrounded her — events that transformed her voice from mere pleasure into refuge.

The hardest test of any creative work — and you know this well — is its capacity to travel across generations; its ability to feel utterly contemporary each time it is revisited. This is what grants a writer, a painter, a musician a life that far outlasts their own — a presence that renews itself with every generation it touches. Fairuz does exactly this, every morning, whenever an application is opened and a song is chosen.

Many were born in her era. Many walked the same road. The years have since folded them into silence. Many once stood shoulder to shoulder with her, yet time — that merciless sieve — swept them aside and kept her. And so, I say, without reservation:

Few musical moments exist as pure and clear as a diamond — and Fairuz stands at the forefront of them all. Few genuine artistic pleasures remain among us still burning with their original brilliance — and Fairuz stands at the forefront of them all. And few voices have ever possessed the power to unite souls from the Atlantic to the Arabian Gulf — and Fairuz stands at the forefront of them all.

Just as the great thinker Taha Hussein earned the title “Dean of Arabic Literature”, Fairuz truly deserves to be the “Dean of Arab Art”.