Arabic is our fertile soil, the language through which we express ourselves and to which we remain steadfastly loyal in our thinking. Yet, in academia, we sometimes find ourselves standing at its threshold, hesitant, when we struggle to summon it to enrich our discourse. Our academic language remains under the sway of English terminology, which we have yet to transcend, making it difficult for us to conduct this interview in Arabic. In an effort to free ourselves from the dominance of English, we offer this text as a summary of the conversation. The precision of its translation into English is not guaranteed.

In his essay Umm Kamel’s Affair, Mohamad Nahleh lifts his gaze toward the darkness of the sky while his feet remain planted in the soil of Jabal ‘Amil, the historical name for Lebanon’s southern lands. There, he unravels the layers of a folktale about Umm Kamel, a woman of considerable social and political standing in Jabal ‘Amil’s history, who, in death, is transformed into a luminous star in the night sky. The essay interrogates the role of the architect, not only as a historian but also as a designer charged with translating history into form. As an architect, Nahleh closely examines the complexities of the night, urging a reconsideration of how the people of Jabal ‘Amil engage with their surroundings in ways that transcend Enlightenment-era paradigms, which reduce darkness to the mere absence of light. It is as if he is declaring that the night is not merely a backdrop, a notion that emerged alongside the advent of artificial lighting. Nahleh emphasizes the intellectual and cultural heritage of the Arab world, advocating for an understanding of the night as a space of social and regional transformation. He explores the architectural possibilities embedded in these nocturnal inquiries, writing in a richly evocative style inspired by his childhood in Jabal ‘Amil. He likens his approach to the experience of listening to stories by candlelight in a rural darkness. This method ensures that narratives are absorbed and transmitted across generations. The night itself becomes a storyteller, reverberating with the words of ancestors, growing more tangible with each telling. In Nahleh’s narrative, the collective voice takes precedence over the individual narrator, forging a mode of storytelling in which the authority of the narrative outweighs that of the storyteller. Addressing an audience of educators, practitioners, and students of architecture, Nahleh’s essay also seeks to engage readers interested in Middle Eastern history, cultural practices beyond urban centers, and environmental history. Yet, he hopes his writing will reach beyond his intended readership, even those who may not share his political stance, particularly in the context of global conflicts such as the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

One of the more immediate interpretations of Umm Kamel’s Affair, when read in English, suggests an association with "marital infidelity," an implication entirely at odds with Nahleh’s intent. On the contrary, Umm Kamel was a devoted mother and wife who dedicated her life to maintaining her family’s feudal power and political influence. Deeply religious, she embodied fidelity in every conventional sense. Yet, the essay explores another kind of cosmic betrayal. Umm Kamel disrupts the order of the stars in Jabal ‘Amil’s night sky by becoming a celestial body herself, assuming a political symbolism that rivals the religious traditions long used by scholars and muezzins to engage with the heavens. In this transformation, she embodies the defiance of a new generation of Jabal ‘Amil’s people, one that rejects the inherited sanctity of the night sky passed down by their ancestors. As a star, Umm Kamel empowers this new generation, which has lived under the persistent violence of Israeli occupation, to refuse the polluted sky filled with warplanes and surveillance drones. She enables them to tell their children that the Israeli aircraft overhead is merely another element of their fraught landscape, something to be endured and resisted in equal measure. Nahleh sees his essay as an exploration of a night sky liberated through the legacy of Jabal ‘Amil’s people. Perhaps this legacy provides a means of understanding the region’s nocturnal landscape as a site of authentic design intentions, ones that meaningfully connect Jabal ‘Amil to both Lebanese and global histories. This, Nahleh asserts, is crucial. It frees the discourse around Jabal ‘Amil from the constraints of simplistic geographical and economic binaries, which often isolate it as a remote periphery, detached from larger conversations about architecture and the climate crisis. He argues that architectural thinking resonates with the act of citation, whether through Quranic verses or personal accounts, which should not be considered separate from empirical realities such as declining rainfall, phosphorus-laden winds, and rising temperatures. In Jabal ‘Amil, where cycles of war and harvest are deeply entangled, it is impossible to disentangle the climate crisis from colonialism or to conceive of it as merely an "environmental issue." Nahleh acknowledges that the relationship between the night and the climate crisis is a growing focus of historical and digital studies. He sees the night as a site for radical architectural experimentation, one that resists the metaphors of the Enlightenment and the surveillance regimes it has enabled, reimagines our relationship with nature, and proposes alternatives to technologies that treat the night solely as a backdrop to be dimmed by artificial illumination.

Perhaps the astonishment provoked by a figure like Umm Kamel, one so formidable that her people felt compelled to elevate her to the sky as a star, reveals a deeper impulse: the need to assert control over the heavens, which have rained misfortune upon them since 1950. To them, Umm Kamel represents their history, not only through her role as the wife and mother of prominent political figures but through the way she captured their collective imagination. She was both powerful and fearsome, her influence extending across gender lines. As a member of a feudal dynasty, she wielded her authority through a network of servants who infiltrated the village’s private and public spaces to gauge the people’s loyalty to her family. One possible reading of Umm Kamel’s celestial transformation is the phonetic resemblance between her name and the Israeli reconnaissance drone MK3. Nahleh concedes that her story does not diverge significantly from the broader history of feudal elites. As a woman, she did not dismantle existing power structures but rather reinforced the patriarchal order that sustained them. In this, her story contrasts with that of Zainab Fawwaz, the pioneering writer and historian who, despite being born into poverty, became a fearless advocate for women’s rights, often placing her life at risk in defiance of societal norms. Through the night, the people of Jabal ‘Amil find an escape from a colonial reality imposed upon them by force. And through the night, Nahleh discovers a philosophical exit, one in which the region’s natural and built environments, along with its ordinary inhabitants, take center stage, rather than the grand heroes of canonical histories, whether male or female. He turns to the land and the sky, asking what they can reveal within their constant transformations. Nahleh differentiates between needs and desires, particularly under colonial projects that sever people from their roots and aspirations. In Jabal ‘Amil, the belief that architecture could shield its people from the environment has eroded, not because of failures in construction, but because of the relentless destruction of buildings by Israel. This cycle of devastation has weakened trust in traditional architecture and deepened the people’s connection to the land and sky rather than to built structures. For Nahleh, Umm Kamel serves as a foundation for a design practice that transcends conventional architectural approaches. He turns instead toward the creation of spaces that defy the authority of traditional architectural plans and instead honor the ways in which the people of Jabal ‘Amil, and beyond, define and embody their own intentions. The night holds these spaces, for despite bombings and destruction, it always returns.