1. Mulāḥaẓāt wa-naẓarāt fanniyyaẗ – the book announced by the author here (and which is perhaps the same as he pointed to already earlier in this Preface) does not seem to have seen the light of the day, as ʕUbayd died only the year after the publication of this foreword. Sabry Hafez, however, would not exclude that it existed and actually was published; cf. what he says about this and other (perhaps lost) publications: »At the end of his two collections, ʕĪsā ʕUbaid advertised his forthcoming publications including two novels, Bayn al-Ḥubb wa-l-Fann (Between Love and Art) and Yaqẓat Miṣr (Egypt’s Awakening); a collection of short stories, al-ʔUsraẗ (The Family); another collection in French, Sur les bords du Nil; a collection of critical essays, Naẓarāt wa-Mulāḥaẓāt Fanniyyaẗ (Artistic Reflections); and several plays. It was customary at this time for writers to fill the final page of their books with what seems more like a declaration of their literary intentions than an authentic list of completed works awaiting publication. But in ʕĪsā’s case, one is inclined to take his list seriously, not only because his advertisements were very detailed and because he succeeded in publishing in 1922 the first book on the list which appeared in the final page of his first collection, but also because Muḥammad Bāqir ʕUlwān of Harvard University discovered in Cairo in 1973 the manuscripts of two of his lost plays« – S. Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse…, Saqi Books, 1993: 292, n. 72. – The adj. fanniyyaẗ, m. fannī, is a nisbah formation from fann which for ʕUbayd mainly means art as ‘technique’, technē. Naẓarāt ‘views, opinions’ is rendered as ‘perspectives/contemplations’ here – ‘perspectives’ seems to be more idiomatic, while ‘contemplations’ is inspired by the title Naẓarāt, a collection of essays and stories by M. L. al-Manfalūṭī (see above), often translated as Contemplations.