A need to step forward and serve with integrity led to the creation of a spiritual bridge between the Arabic-speaking community and ESSAY. 

In the middle of 2022, our journey began not with a grand plan, but with a quiet realization between two fellows. We saw a gap that felt like a canyon: the life-giving words of the ESSAY magazine were largely locked away in English, leaving many of our Arabic-speaking brothers and sisters struggling to find the same depth of recovery we had discovered. We knew that if we were to truly live out our legacy of service, we had to find a way to bridge that gap. We had to translate the “language of the heart” into our own tongue.

Today, there are fifteen of us—a small fellowship within the Fellowship—bound together by the principles of Unity, Service, and Recovery. We aren’t just people who know two languages; we are recovering sexaholics who understand that a single misplaced word can change the meaning of a spiritual truth.

As we grew, we realized that our mission required a specific kind of spiritual architecture. We began to see our work through the lens of the equilateral triangle, the same symbol that anchors our recovery. At the very top of our work sits Amanah—Honesty. It is the apex of everything we do. Before we even touch a keyboard, we have to be honest about our intent. We aren’t here to edit the message or make it sound more “palatable” to our culture; we are here to be faithful stewards of the original spirit. This honesty keeps us grounded, reminding us that we are trusted servants, not authors.

This commitment naturally flows into our need for Accuracy, or Diqah. In the early days, we wrestled with how to capture the nuances of Twelve-Step recovery—terms that don’t always have a direct equivalent in traditional Arabic. To honor this, we looked for ways to sharpen our tools. We embraced the latest advancements in technology, not as a replacement for our recovery, but as a servant to it. By training AI models specifically on the “proper language” of our program, we’ve been able to refine our drafts with a level of precision we couldn’t have imagined in 2022. 

Maintaining this clarity requires a deep sense of Objectivity, or Mawdu’iyyah. In our logo, this is represented by the radiant book of the ESSAY. We strive to be like the clear glass of a window; we want the light of the message to pass through us without being tinted by our personal opinions, our regional dialects, or our own ego. 

At the heart of it all are the Translators of the ESSAY. We stand in the center of that triangle, protected by Honesty, Accuracy, and Objectivity. We have found that by losing ourselves in this service, our own recovery has deepened. We started with two; we are now fifteen, and our hope is that through these translated pages, the message of Sexaholics Anonymous will continue to reach every corner where an Arabic speaker is still suffering in the dark. We are just the messengers, grateful to be part of a bridge that leads toward the light.