Abdullah Al-Samti 

The aesthetic literary vision formed an editorial concern in the cultural horizon of Ahwal al-Ma'rifa magazine since its issuance and early beginnings. Creative achievement is one of the pillars of cultural awareness, and creativity in its various literary genres - poetry, prose, novels, artistic prose, and theatrical dramatic literature, and even criticism if we consider literary criticism close to the creative act as an independent creative genre - represents the ideal value image of the movement of the Arab imagination, and the movement of meditation, investigation, disclosure, and expression of man, reality, and life, through various known artistic and aesthetic mechanisms, according to the literary generic vision required by each written art, whether an image, a meaning, a narration, a dialogue, or a description of characters, or establishing a dialectical dialogue structure.

All these literary fields feed into the pattern of art, the pattern of creativity, and the general cultural space that expresses the aesthetic and creative identity of the nation, and refers to the components of collective consciousness.

Embracing Literature:

Ahwal al-Ma'rifa embraced literature in its various forms, and despite the simple beginnings of the magazine due to the number of its pages and its primary printing, it presented a large group of creative names and contributed to conveying the literary scene to the general reader, especially with the increase in the number of its pages, and the establishment of a special section for literature, creativity, and literary criticism containing more than 16 pages in each of its issues. The magazine sought to present the literary scene by focusing on two core areas:

• The first field: Arab literature in general, presenting its most prominent poetic, short story, novel, and critical voices.
• The second field: Saudi Arab literature, by publishing selections of literary works including poems, short stories, very short stories, and scenes from novels, as well as literary and critical articles.

Depending on the purposes and als of cultural and literary magazines, they diversify the literary material as follows:

Providing a literary, cultural, or intellectual dialogue with one of the literary and cultural figures, then publishing a number of concentrated literary articles, then publishing a group of various literary texts. The magazine may touch upon some literary issues raised in the literary scene, and it may prepare files of literary and cultural files that approach the knowledge scene, and it may publish a group of serialized critical episodes that enrich the literary and creative reality.

The literary section of the magazine formed a large space that attracted a group of prominent names, and from another perspective completed the cognitive and cultural orientation of the magazine, which embraces in other spaces fields of followers, cultural seminars, manuscript investigation, book reviews, and providing information about the largest Arab, Islamic, and international libraries, and monitoring the most prominent book fairs in the world, as well as articles and studies dealing with fine and traditional arts, antiquities, translations, rare books, library sciences, indexing, and various knowledge technologies.

Textual Movement:

The literary material presented by Ahwal al-Ma'rifa magazine throughout its previous quarterly issues constitutes a wonderful source for research and literary study. It clearly represents the local and Arab literary scene, and documented it throughout the paper phase in which it was issued, and still documents it electronically. It did not stop at a single form of literary forms, but diversified in publishing literary materials greatly, whether at the level of poetic texts or prose texts.

In poetry, it presented texts belonging to the vertical poem, as well as texts from activist poetry and prose poems. In the short story, it diversified greatly in publishing texts belonging to the short story or those belonging to the very short story. The same can be said for presenting studies and critical articles belonging to different critical methods from impressionistic, effective, social criticism, and realistic criticism, until the publication of articles aimed at reading literary works from a textual, stylistic, structural, or deconstructive point of view included in modern and contemporary criticism methods.

This diversity carried the image of the literary scene in its various spectrums. We read in the magazine Saudi and Arab names and even translated international names. A group of the most prominent literary voices in the Kingdom and the Arab world from different creative generations were present in the magazine, such as: Mohammed Al-Mansour Al-Shaqha, Dr. Ibrahim Al-Awaji, Dr. Abdulaziz Khoja, Dr. Ghazi Al-saibi, Fawziya Abu Khalid, Thuraya Al-Areed, Dr. Saad Al-Bazei, Ahmed Saleh Al-Saleh (Musafir), Abdullah Al-Zaid, Abdulaziz Al-Saqabi, Mohammed Abdul Razzaq Al-Qashami, Mohammed Zayed Al-Alma'i, Ibrahim Zouli, Dr. Ashjan Hindi, Ibrahim Al-Wafi, Khalid Al-Yousef, Ahmed Al-Luhaib, Rabab Al-Nimr, Ibtisam Al-Baqami, Asma Al-Ahmadi, Saad Al-Thaqafi, Abdulrahman Al-Mahsini, Muflih Al-Shammari, Izzat Al-Tairi, Hassan Ali Al-Batran, Doha Abdul Raouf Al-Mall, Dr. Imad Al-Din Al-Khatib, Dr. Hussein Al-Manasirah, Dr. Walid Qassab, Dr. Camellia Abdel Fattah, Dr. Walid Mashouh, and many others who enriched the literary pages of the magazine with their rich literary texts and writings. In addition to literary translations of stories and poems from...