Amin Maalouf writes about identity the way a cartographer draws coastlines — aware that every border is an approximation, that the territory always resists the map. Born in Beirut in 1949, educated in French, rooted in Arabic literary tradition, and now a member of the Académie Française, Maalouf has spent his career dismantling the very notion of singular identity that continues to fuel conflict across the Mediterranean — a project he shares with writers like Predrag Matvejević, who approached the same questions through geography rather than fiction.
His novels — Leo Africanus, The Rock of Tanios (Prix Goncourt, 1993), Ports of Call, Balthasar’s Odyssey — are set at the crossroads of civilizations: in medieval Fez, Ottoman Beirut, Renaissance Rome. His essay In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (1998) remains one of the most lucid analyses of how identity becomes lethal when reduced to a single affiliation.
This conversation was recorded during a cultural symposium in Naples, where Maalouf was characteristically thoughtful, precise, and resistant to easy answers.
EuroMed Café: Your essay In the Name of Identity argues that identity is not a single allegiance but a collection of affiliations. Nearly a decade later, has the world moved closer to that understanding?
Amin Maalouf: Further from it, I am afraid. The book was written in the aftermath of the Algerian civil war, at a time when I naively hoped that the end of the Cold War would open space for more nuanced thinking about who we are. Instead, we moved from the binary of East and West to an even more dangerous binary: Islam and the West. This is a catastrophe for everyone, on both sides.
EMC: You write in French, but your cultural roots are Arabic. How does that duality shape your work?
AM: I do not experience it as duality. I experience it as richness. French is the language in which I think most precisely. Arabic is the language in which I feel most deeply. My novels exist in the space between those two registers. When I write about a character from the Levant, I hear their Arabic even as I write their dialogue in French. This is not a conflict. This is literature.
EMC: The Euro-Mediterranean dialogue has been a political project since the Barcelona Process in 1995. Has it produced real cultural exchange?
AM: Political projects produce conferences. Cultural exchange happens when a teenager in Marseille discovers Oum Kalthoum, or when a student in Cairo reads Camus in Arabic and realizes that The Stranger is set in his own country. These moments cannot be engineered by institutions. But institutions can create conditions where they are more likely to happen — through translation, through film distribution, through educational exchange. The Barcelona Process did some of that. Whether it was enough, history will judge.
EMC: You have described yourself as a writer who belongs to two cultures without fully belonging to either. Is that a comfortable position?
AM: Comfortable? No. Productive? Immensely. The writer who belongs fully to one culture sees only what that culture wants him to see. The writer who stands at the margin — between Lebanon and France, between Arabic and French, between Islam and Christianity — sees the blind spots of both. That is where literature lives. In the blind spots.
EMC: What role can literature play in the current moment of civilizational tension?
AM: Literature reminds us that the other person has an interior life. That is its only function, but it is an essential one. When you read a novel, you inhabit another consciousness. You see through eyes that are not your own. If I have any ambition as a writer, it is to make the reader — whether in Paris or Beirut or Cairo — feel, for three hundred pages, what it is like to be someone else. If enough people had that experience, we would live in a different world. The women directors reshaping Mediterranean cinema today are doing exactly that — making audiences see through eyes not their own.
Amin Maalouf was elected to the Académie Française in 2011 and became its Perpetual Secretary in 2023 — the first person of Arab origin to hold that position. His most recent novel, Our Unexpected Brothers (2020), imagines a future in which a mysterious event forces humanity to radically rethink its divisions.