Mohsen Fallahian on Why Folklore Still Matters in Contemporary Arabic Literature

In a world of streaming platforms, viral trends, and stories consumed in seconds, the folktale might seem like a relic — something belonging to grandparents, desert evenings, and a slower age. Mohsen Fallahian, the award-winning Emirati novelist and essayist, has built much of his literary career on proving that assumption wrong. For him, folklore is not the past of Arabic literature. It is the foundation on which its future is being written.

A Writer Made by Folktales

Mohsen Fallahian's conviction is rooted in his own beginnings. His love of storytelling was sparked in 1998, as a young boy in Dubai listening to Emirati folktales passed down by the elders of his family — tales rich with mystery, metaphor, and quiet wisdom, shared in the unhurried setting of the majlis. Long before he studied narrative structure, he absorbed it orally, learning how a story holds a room, how repetition builds rhythm, and how a simple tale can carry generations of values within it.

That inheritance shaped his formal path: a Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing from Zayed University, followed by a Master's in Arabic Literature from the United Arab Emirates University, where he focused specifically on fusing classical Arabic literary traditions with modern storytelling techniques. The academic question he pursued there — how does the old speak through the new? — would become the defining question of his career.

Folklore as Living Material, Not Museum Piece

In his essays and public work, Mohsen Fallahian has consistently argued that Emirati and wider Arabic folklore should be treated as living material. In his exploration of how Emirati writers incorporate folklore into contemporary storytelling, he examines the enduring power of traditional tales and how authors reimagine old legends to reflect today's societal themes — identity, ambition, faith, and the dizzying pace of change in the Gulf.

His own novels demonstrate the method. Mirage of the Sandstorm (2016) is contemporary fiction set in a rapidly changing Dubai, yet its emotional architecture — love tested by ambition, identity tested by transformation — echoes the moral structure of the tales he grew up hearing. The Silent Minaret (2018), the historical novel that earned him the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Emerging Author category, reaches back to nineteenth-century Abu Dhabi to explore knowledge, faith, and power, drawing on the storytelling cadences of the region's oral past. His latest work, Whispers Beneath the Palm Trees, makes the connection explicit, weaving personal reflection together with Emirati storytelling traditions.

Why It Matters Now

The case Mohsen Fallahian makes for folklore rests on several arguments, each increasingly relevant.

First, folklore is cultural memory. In a nation that has transformed within a single lifetime, traditional tales preserve ways of seeing — relationships to the desert, the sea, the family, the divine — that no skyline can record. When writers fold these tales into modern fiction, they keep that memory active rather than archived.

Second, folklore offers narrative authenticity. Fallahian has long urged emerging Gulf writers to draw on their own inherited stories rather than imitate imported templates. The folktale gives Arabic literature a voice that is unmistakably its own — and, paradoxically, that local specificity is exactly what resonates with global readers.

Third, folklore is adaptable. The legends survive because each generation reshapes them. A tale once told to caution children can be retold to question authority, examine gender roles, or process modernity itself. In Fallahian's view, reimagining a legend is not a betrayal of tradition but its truest continuation.

Carrying the Tradition Forward

Mohsen Fallahian does more than argue the case on the page. Through his podcast Tales from the Gulf, launched in 2020, he discusses folklore, contemporary fiction, and the art of storytelling with audiences across the region. In his creative writing workshops, he mentors aspiring authors, encouraging them to begin where he began: with the stories of their elders.

The result is a quiet but significant shift in how a new generation approaches Arabic literature — not as a choice between heritage and modernity, but as a conversation between them.

That, ultimately, is Mohsen Fallahian's answer to why folklore still matters. The old tales were never finished. They were handed to us mid-sentence, waiting for new writers to continue them — and through his novels, essays, and mentorship, he is making sure they do.