childhood, so that one heard nothing but the sounds of merriment and peals of joyful laughter answering the twittering of the sparrows in the echoes of that delightful garden!...
We in the East do not value childhood at its true worth — that much is agreed — and if we attend to it at all, we regard it merely as a stage in which the child prepares for his coming life, and so we fill this stage with exhaustion, harshness, and every color of torment in the name of discipline. A party of educators in our country still regards the rod as heaven's gift to the earth.
I ask in Lebanon, and of Lebanon, swift care for the child! Were it permitted me to ask for the creation of a Ministry of Childhood, I would demand it, for it is not right that the poisons of poverty, disease, ignorance, and neglect should blight our growing seedlings! And if I am told that these matters fall within the province of the Ministry of Social Affairs, then I would demand the creation of that ministry, and demand that it be entrusted to a woman minister, for she knows these affairs better than man; here is her natural field of activity and her vital range. What matters to me is that we care for the child, that we build for him public gardens and grounds for innocent play, and that we guarantee him food, clothing, and medicine! This is what I ask, and I do not think that, like Victor Hugo's little girl, I am asking for the moon!...
The Ministry of Justice, considering the crimes committed by these juveniles, has seen fit to reform them rather than inflict punishment upon them — a sound view — isolating them, for the protection of their morals, from the criminals of the prisons in a special place which it has named the 'Juvenile Reformatory'; it has fitted out for it the seraglio building at Bhannes, drawn up for it a modern program, and set aside the necessary appropriations in the budget.
All this is fine, and it is a step on which the government is to be congratulated. But is it not better that the reform of these minors should begin before they commit their crimes? We live in the age of preventive medicine, whose watchword is to fight the disease before it strikes, thanks to the modern means of prevention — vaccination, the destruction of germs, and the immunity the body acquires...
Must we then wait for these waifs to turn criminal before we set about reforming them — when their reform, as those versed in matters of education well know, will by then have become an arduous and difficult thing? Or shall we gather them from the streets before they sink into the mire of vice and the bent toward crime and evil takes root in them, and establish for them a special wing in the Juvenile Reformatory at Bhannes, to be supervised and directed by the Lebanese Women's League, which would draw up for it a full program!
Here is a field fit for purely humanitarian service; here is the pressing need for swift action! I am not asking for impossibilities; I ask only that we send to these children, wherever they may be and in whatever school they are found — making no distinction of race, color,
or creed — a glass of sterilized milk every forenoon, or a wholesome midday meal; and I ask that we furnish them with warm clothing to ward off the winter's cold.
These are two humanitarian projects which I hope the flourishing Lebanese Women's League will adopt, and for whose realization I hope it will make ready at the opening of this new year, so that its bounty may extend to the few and to the many alike, doing good at one and the same time to the well-to-do elite, guiding and organizing it, and to the forgotten, deprived class, reviving it and giving it life...
And finally, ladies, I have burdened your breasts with talk of misery and poverty; so let us listen to our greatest poet, Shawqi, speaking through the tongue of Antonio in his immortal play Cleopatra:
Life is love, and love is life; it is, from life's great tree, the secret of the seed; and over its desert his two hands passed, and it flowed with water, and shade, and fruit.
Shawqi spoke truly: life is a desert over which the hands of love have passed, and it has flowed with sweet water, spreading shade, and ripe fruit...
Life is a barren desert whose oasis is woman... To it man repairs, quenching his thirst at its sweet spring, finding in its shelter and its tenderness shade, warmth, and peace of mind, and gathering from the sincerity of its affection the choicest fruits! May this oasis — with its shade, its water, and its fruit — be good and luminous, spreading guidance, art, and beauty, and pouring out upon the world goodness, blessing, and peace...
of which the ladies of the curtained chambers tell.
And the words of Omar ibn Abi Rabi'a in ghazal:
Would that on the day my death is decreed I might kiss what lies between your eyes and your mouth. Would that Umm al-Fadl were my companion, there or here, in paradise or in hell.
As for amatory verse, it is the field of woman's appearance in poetry, and in both literatures there is beautiful amatory verse. The nasib in Arabic literature stands at the utmost height and purity, chaste in diction and delicate in feeling; but it lost these qualities when the age of luxury came, becoming affected in word and in sentiment, and there mingled with it such obscenity, and such amatory verse addressed to males, as English poetry kept itself above.
The English love lyric is tender, gentle, lofty in its similes. The English poet contents himself with describing his beloved's smile, or the gleam of her hair, or the blue of her eyes that resembles the wide, beautiful sea, and other such things that belong rather to descriptions of the soul.
This has been a brief glance at the two literatures and woman's influence in them. And let us not forget that between woman and literature there is a close bond, which quickens and strengthens in the measure of society's advancement and culture, its view of woman, and the degree of her advancement, her learning, and her cultivation.