In My Library

Reviewed here are all the works presented to the library of “The Woman’s Voice.”

The library is, without doubt, the most important furnishing of the house, for it shows the measure of its inhabitants’ concern with the affairs of mind and spirit. A house with no well-stocked library in it has in it neither mind nor spirit. And it is regrettable that we find most of our houses empty and bare of even a single book of value. Do our ladies not know that the finer homes in other people’s countries, unlike most of ours, attend to the library before they attend to the radio, or the carpet, or the other articles with which houses are furnished? And do our ladies know, too, that a large portion of the budget of any of the finer homes in other people’s countries is set aside each year for the purchase of books, magazines, and newspapers?

And now, Madam, on my desk are all sorts of new books: some of them concern you directly, some concern you indirectly, and some do not concern you at all. Allow me, then, to review a few of them for you briefly now, in the hope that you may choose what pleases you to read and to keep in your well-stocked library, God willing.

Before me now, among these books, is the collection “Speeches” by Dr. Charles Malik, professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut and Lebanon’s Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington. It comes in a small-sized volume, elegant like everything that “Dar al-Kitab” publishes and “Dar al-Ahad” prints in Beirut. The price of a copy is one Lebanese lira. You may order it from the publishers or from the large Arabic bookshops.

In my view, this book is of great importance for three principal reasons. First: because it is the product of a great thinker among our thinkers. Second: because it is the official record of what the first Lebanese minister plenipotentiary in America has delivered. And third: because it expresses truly, consciously, and profoundly the essence of Lebanon and its message to the world.

In my hands also is a book entitled “Reason in Islam” by Dr. Karim Azkoul. It runs to some 200 pages in large format, published by the Sader bookshop and printed by the Sader-Rihani press in Beirut. Its price is five Lebanese liras. This book may well be one of the few Arabic works to show such clarity of idea, purity of expression, and strength of philosophical argument. And its subject may prove most absorbing to anyone interested in knotty philosophical questions. Dr. Azkoul is, without doubt, among those best entitled to treat such a subject, for he made it his specialty at one of the universities of Germany. And notwithstanding my strictures upon the basis on which the subject turns, the book holds an excellent place among the books that Arabic letters contain.

On my desk likewise is a collection of lectures by Mr. Fayez Sayegh, published for him by the Wajib bookshop under the title “The National Rebirth”; its pages number 225, and its price is two and a half Lebanese liras. This book has many merits that place it in the front rank of works whose subject turns upon the affairs of national life. In it there is true criticism and balanced thinking, which place its author, beyond dispute, among the choice elite of our young thinkers.

Space may permit me, in this issue of “The Woman’s Voice,” to mention three more books: two of them published for Mr. Mikhail Naimy by the Sader bookshop in Beirut.

The first is a story entitled “Encounter,” its pages numbering about 130 and its price 4 Lebanese liras — and the second is a long essay of about 70 pages, its price one and a quarter Lebanese liras, entitled “The Idols.” Both books are worth reading, like all of Naimy’s works. Yet we expected “The Idols” to be deeper and more original, just as we could have wished that “Encounter” had not drowned in idealism to the point of stripping it of life and leaving it bare of all but the luster of style, the loftiness of atmosphere, and the grace of shadow and color.

As for the third book, it is “Micromégas.” And what, my reader, shall tell you what Micromégas is? It is a little book by the famous French writer Voltaire, rendered into Arabic by Mr. Elias Abu Shabaka and issued by the Publishing Company for French Letters in Beirut; its pages number about 69, and its price is one and a quarter Lebanese liras. Its contents are philosophical tales — in the general, elastic sense — which Voltaire wrote in the early part of the latter half of the eighteenth century, attacking the French society of that day; so they came out as sardonic criticisms under a garb of revolt. The Publishing Company for French Letters has seen fit to present them to readers of Arabic in its series “Treasures of Western Thought,” as one of those treasures! If that is so, how much more fitting it would have been for the publishing company not to begin presenting Voltaire to us by way of this treasure! Or not to present this treasure at all. For on the one hand this lowers the standing of the “Treasures of Western Thought,” and on the other it shakes the confidence of the readers of Western thought in this country. What I see is that the Publishing Company for French Letters follows, in presenting these treasures to Arabic letters, no fixed and considered order, but strikes about at random. May the company, then, reconsider this matter, so that its service to Arabic letters may become a more useful and more profitable service.