Zakaria Tamer

He was born in the al-Basha district of Damascus. Forced to leave school in 1944, at thirteen, to help provide for his family, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a locksmith in a factory in the al-Basha district. As an autodidact he spent many hours reading, became interested in politics, and continued his education at night school; as he later said in an interview, his reading provoked him "to create a voice which [he] hadn't been able to find [there]". His intention was to represent in his writing the very poor majority of men and women in Syria, with their joyless and restricted existence. ¹

His first stories were published in Syrian journals in 1957. His first manuscript was noticed by Yusuf al-Khal, editor of the magazine Shi'r, who published it as his first collection, The Neighing of the White Steed (1960). Tamer then left blacksmithing for work as a government official and as editor of several journals, including the cultural periodicals Al-Mawqif al-Adabi and Al-Marifa and the children's magazine Usamah. He was instrumental in establishing the Syrian Writers Union in 1968 and was its vice-president for four years. In 1980 he was dismissed from editing Al-Marifa, published by the Ministry of Culture, after publishing extracts from Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi's The Characteristics of Despotism (1900), which denounced tyranny and called for freedom; he then decided to leave Syria for London. ¹

In London he was managing editor of Al-Dustoor magazine (1981–1982), culture editor of Al-Tadhamon (1983–1988), managing editor of Al-Naqid (1988–1993), and culture editor at Riyadh Al Rayes Publishing House, while writing satirical columns for Arabic newspapers. His eleven collections of short stories include The Thunder (1970), Damascus Fire (1973), Tigers on the Tenth Day (1978), Noah's Summons (1994) and Sour Grapes (2000), whose English translation appeared in 2023. In January 2012 he opened a Facebook page, Al-Mihmaz ("The Spur"), publishing daily articles, most recently on the Syrian uprising. His awards include the Sultan Bin Ali Al Owais Cultural Foundation prize (2001), the Syrian Order of Merit (2002), the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Prize (2009) and the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Freedom and Creativity (2015). ¹

No article text names Zakaria Tamer's religion or any school; the religious and social taboos in his stories are literary subject matter, not evidence of an affiliation. Wikidata's religion value for him is Islam in general — a single structured value naming no school — and the English and Urdu articles file him in categories for Syrian Muslims; category filings are not attestations. The museum therefore records his faith as unknown, flagged, with the position stated exactly in his data record. ^{1 2 3}

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