Dr. Issa's victory came due to the book's uniqueness in analyzing the textual interrelation and intersecting intellectual structures between Arabic and Persian poetry. As for Dr. Armen, he deserved the award for his excellence in observing the human commonalities in rural narratives of two luminaries of Arabic and Persian literatures: Taha Hussein and Mohammad Ali Islami Nodooshan. Dr. Al-Ali won her award for providing a solid insight into the duality of space in free verse and its characteristics in two luminaries of free verse in Arabic and Persian.
This award is a natural extension and culmination of the prolific academic journey of the late Dr. Youssef Bakr, who is considered an academic figure and a leading reference in the field of comparative literature at the Arab world level, who enriched the critical library with dozens of works and translations. His exceptional imprint was particularly evident in the field of 'Khayamian Studies', where he established original critical approaches that traced Omar Khayyam's quatrains, studied their translations, and analyzed their profound impact on the Arabic poetic sentiment. Building on this long cognitive experience, his vision crystallized to establish the award, to be the first of its kind in the Arab world in the specialty of comparative studies (Eastern-Eastern).
In line with this vision, the award regulations stipulated clear academic goals, most notably encouraging researchers to innovate and innovate within the framework of benefiting from the differences and similarities between civilizations and their common denominators. It also seeks to revive relations between the languages of the Islamic world and to highlight the Arab literary ties with the literatures of Islamic peoples and the manifestations of influence and impact between them, as well as motivating researchers to submit serious studies that contribute to restoring a feature of Islamic civilization.
The jury and the Board of Trustees confirmed that these publications possess equivalent strengths in terms of originality, depth of analysis, and good use of commonalities, which makes them equally deserving of the academic merit to win the award.
It is worth noting that the value of the award is $3000 in each cycle, and the Association will later announce the date of the ceremony to honor the winners. In conjunction with the conclusion of this cycle, the Association announced the start of preparations for the fifth cycle, where the official announcement will be made on March 1st next via its website, in preparation for opening the door to receive applications for nomination and participation starting from the 15th of the same month until the end of June.
