My analogy of Othman al-Sini to a “star-gatherer”, as is my first title for this article, came from his distinguished successes, as he flies from a high peak towards the sky and picks a group of stars, then lands on another peak, to fly to the sky again on a star-picking mission. .
During your babysitting with Dr. Othman, especially those bilateral sessions in which an atmosphere of friendliness and light humor prevails, not to mention the uniqueness of science in language, poetry, dialects, history, geography, and sociology, the first thing that catches your eye is that he arranges your Saudi Arabia again, removing those imaginary threads of ugly regionalism in your mind And the fuse of tribalism and its racism is removed from your head, and your conscience is studded with the inclusive Saudi mosaic fused into the path of the homeland, and the homeland only. This is my experience when I got closer to this lofty Saudi stature.
Dr. Saad Al-Soyyan tells me: “Dr. Othman Al-Sini represents a Saudi cultural face that is rare today, in terms of his depth of knowledge, and in terms of his multiple rich experiences in the academic and scientific fields, the media and journalistic fields, and the cultural field, as he was one of the pioneers of the modernist project in the period The eighties and beyond. The most important characteristic of the Chinese from the point of view of Al-Soyyan: that he is realistic, knows his own value completely, so he does not misplace it, just as he is not tainted by populism with which some of his peers who surpass them in knowledge and merit were involved.
And due to my knowledge of Dr. Othman’s aversion to populism, and the demand of the Jamahiriya, he originated the eloquence of the word “hyat”, and traced it back to the second century AH, as it was mentioned by Dhul-Rama al-Tamimi, the resident of the Saudi Samman. This aversion comes by virtue of the psychological nature of the doctor who takes matters realistically as they are. Not as it is imagined in the mind, to glorify or underestimate, and perhaps this is due to a genetic matter that he inherited from his ancient ancestors, I mean the gene of wisdom.
One of the most beautiful things that you can hear from Dr. Othman’s opinions is that caring for the popular heritage, its expressions, poems, stories, songs, and folklore does not disturb the eloquence of the language, does not exclude it, or destroys it, since that calls for raising the importance of colloquial speech, and this opinion comes from A man of knowledge who adheres to the cores of Arabic, its eloquence and colloquialism, and perhaps this opinion, if Mahmoud Shaker had heard it, would have reduced its exaggeration somewhat, and enriched it from long research and painstaking exploration, as he said during his talk about the book: “Nafusa Zakaria Saeed, History of the Call to Colloquialism and its Effects in Egypt, 1964 And Dr. Othman believes that the claim to destroy classical Arabic by caring for the intangible heritage is a direct accusation of the fragility of classical Arabic to the extent that a Nabataean poem can destroy it, and believes that this is a grave insult to the Arabic language, and saying this matter is a contradiction to God Almighty’s preservation of the language. The Holy Qur’an: “Indeed, We have sent down the remembrance, and we will preserve it.” And the noble verse is as if it addresses everyone, and says: Do whatever you like, for the language is preserved by God’s preservation through the Holy Qur’an.
And when Dr. Othman saw that much of the oral heritage was lost with the death of men who carried in their chests an intangible heritage, he did not stand idly by, but rather started with himself and tried to preserve and archive what could be archived in his mind or his files, until the Intangible Heritage Association was born, to carry out the task of not It comes in its most complex details except through collective memories, and what those memories inherited from the inheritance of the word, the verse, the songs, the popular game, and the like.
Othman al-Sini’s knowledge, his passion for language, heritage, dialects, its people and what is related to them were not. To grow in this unique way had it not been for factors, the most important of which came in the place of his birth, which is Makkah Al-Mukarramah with diversity and human variation in their shapes, colors and languages, which does not pass in any other city in the world, millions of faces, thousands of dialects, and hundreds of languages, which are formed in the faces of pilgrims and pilgrims, from different All over the world, all of them were passing by his small carpet in front of his father's shop in Bab Al-Safa in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which made him learn a part of various languages, until another shift came in his life, which was studying in Dar Al-Tawhid in his beloved city of Taif, as he was the only urbanite among The sons of the various tribes, so he knew their knowledge and took their culture complete and undiminished, and became a reference for them in it, an expert in the corridors of their genealogies, their customs, their poems, their songs, their dances, and other amazing science, its strangeness and its perpetuities.
Turki Al-Dakhil says, in a luxurious and interesting article about Al-Siny: At the height of the clashes of modernity with the traditionalists in the 1980s in Saudi Arabia, Othman was one of the godfathers of modernity and its theorists, so he wrote articles and wrote research papers with which he filled newspapers. His friend describes these writings as opening up a new horizon. Dr. Ahmed Al-Tihani says: “Othman Al-Sini is the real symbol of the battle of modernity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but he is the symbol who did not say here I am. He is one of the symbols of the modernity of the eighties, who were wronged a lot, and the injustice was not lifted from them when history returned to its senses.” Al-Tihani was completely right, but he is in pain, and rightfully so, over something Al-Tihani knows, that the Chinese do not pay attention to him! Othman's humility makes him cancel the idea of the individual, for the sake of the idea of the project and the group!
And when Fuhaid al-Adim, in eloquent eloquence, likened the journey of grandfather Hussein from the country of China through the Himalayas, to the Sacred House of God, to the grandson’s journey from the terrain of language, thought and literature to the world of journalism and media, the analogy was not wrong, for the bumpy road and its thorns are the same, they do not differ.
One of what Dr. Othman fears most is the issue of fetishizing people’s thoughts. Therefore, he calls for the de-sanctification of heritage, and when he restricts that what was the Qur’an or an established Sunnah is not a heritage but a religion, he draws a middle line between extremism that is expensive, and another extremism that is unacceptable, and Arab thought is indispensable for them.
And the Chinese's passion for the human tongue did not stop at dialects, but rather transcended it to other languages, and to ask him who he sees about the Arabic words in the language of the Amerindians.
Finally, how wonderful is the saying of Othman Al-Sini: “Yesterday we were chasing the news, and today the news follows us wherever we are.”
Khaled Al Adadh
