A Voice from Lebanon

I know nothing of Mr. Zaki Mubarak except that he is a writer who believes in his own genius, prides himself on his literature, and proclaims his culture, deliberately belittling others and casting aspersions on everyone else, promoting himself, trumpeting the loftiness of his station, bewailing his luck, and enumerating the names of his enviers — who are many, according to what he says and claims and proclaims.

He has works, some of which I have read in the library at home and about others of which I have asked; most of them, I found, lack depth and freshness, and some of them — like "Layla the Ailing in Iraq," for example — are inanity beyond all inanity. This is all that a young lady of Beirut knows about Mr. Mubarak — one who can say of herself that she is somewhat cultivated, and that from time to time she reads some of the books and papers that issue from the presses of Egypt and the other Arab countries.

So when I read Mr. Mubarak's latest article on woman in the magazine "Musamarat al-Jib," I was dumbfounded — not merely because the article is of the kind that injures its own author, but because the issuing of such opinions from a writer like Mr. Mubarak is a thing that invites doubt as to the writer's mind and balance, and invites the belief that the inanity that has issued from him in his works is a chronic disease for which there is no way of cure, and that these specimens are but the forerunners of other specimens yet baser and more vile. For when logic fails a writer, and breadth of spirit deserts him, and the fever of ignorance gets the better of him, he exposes his nakedness and reverts to his origin — and there he is, his very self, in his article: ill breeding and inane opinions, an assault upon reason, a defiance of logic, and a violation of the simplest rules of decency, self-respect, and noble character.

Mr. Mubarak is married, as is well known from his book ("Layla the Ailing" — or "Mubarak the Ailing"), and this invites the suspicion that when he writes about woman he is really writing about his own house and family. If the man has been unsuccessful in his family life, that is no fault of woman's, nor is it among her errors; it would have better befitted him to choose well, and so not fall into the very thing he talks of and denounces...

As for Mr. Mubarak's method of treating woman — the use of scolding and rebuke, the stick and the whip — it is a method the animals themselves have left off using at the present time; Mr. Mubarak need only take himself a room in the zoological garden to see how the dog disdains his method, the cat his policy, and the wolf his brutality...

The sum of the matter is that civilization has been built, in past and present, and will be built in the future, upon the arms of men and women together. Women in the past acquitted themselves — in building and construction and in defense of the homeland — as well as men did. And they have rights in the common homeland just as men have rights; anything else is drivel, issuing only from fools and dolts. We hold Mr. Mubarak above stooping — he who has reviled and assaulted, defamed and denounced most of the writers of Egypt and the Arab countries — to take up woman today in his article with an assault, or with an accusation against her morals and her station, ignoring the simplest duties of courtesy and noble character... and forgetting that Muhammad, the lord of the Arabs, proclaimed otherwise and commanded other than this...