After more than a decade dedicated to spotlighting the region’s history and culture, Afikra has released its first-ever book, Daftar: Beginnings. First imagined as a journal and later developed into a quarterly digital platform featuring essays and interviews on the Arab world, the project now reaches a new phase, gathering years of online work into a single, tangible volume.
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Named after the Arabic word for “notebook, Daftar aims at being “a space for reflection, ideas, and marginalia,” seeking to reclaim “authorship over the Arab narrative—a history often scattered, erased, or narrated by others.” Centered on the theme of “beginnings,” their inaugural issue brings together a range of voices examining the said concept across disciplines and contexts, spanning art, architecture, heritage, design, and poetry.
“Every beginning is a return—an echo, a gesture, a question asked in a new voice. In this inaugural print edition of Daftar, we explore origins across the Arab world not as fixed points, but as living forces: from cities built on buried stories to homes that nurtured revolutions of thought; from enduring lineages of Arab design and cuisine to museums looted and memories made fragile,”Afikra said of the book’s content and launch on Instagram.
“Some beginnings emerge from absence and erasure, made visible again through acts of remembrance and reinvention. The past moves through us not as residue but as momentum that shapes what comes next. Beginnings, then, are not simply departures, but acts of reflection, return, and reclamation,” they added.
To mark the launch of this debut milestone, Afikra is hosting a dedicated event in Beirut at the Beirut Art Center on Dec. 27, 2026, bringing together the contributors, collaborators, and members of its wider community all together to celebrate the book’s publishing.
