We Are in a Cage... But One of Gold

How wretched we are, we girls and young women of this generation!

We are in perpetual oscillation, knowing no steadiness! We are like a feather in the wind, or a pebble swept along by a raging current: it neither stays in its old place nor reaches its new station except after continuous agitation and confusion — and perhaps our lives will run out before we ever reach firm ground...

"Would that we had been created fifty years ago, or more!" That is a sentence I have heard from the mouths of dozens of my friends, and they repeated it in earnest, because our grandmothers lived in bliss. And bliss in this earthly life lies only in contentment of living and in its stability. How often have we heard from our grandmothers and our mothers delightful accounts of their lives — lives which, though to outward view empty of the means of comfort and ease that we find today, were serene and abundant lives, whose days and nights they grieved to see pass; while we, whenever a year ends, expect to greet a better one, only to find it bitterer than what went before...

On the long winter nights our grandmothers would stay up together in high spirits, joining the watches of the night between listening now to a beautiful voice and a plaintive instrument, now to the tales of the ancients and their delightful anecdotes, until dawn broke upon them; then they would marvel at how quickly the night had passed, and join their day to their night, taking food along and going for an outing in one of the famous orchards, then returning to their houses at noon, the "morning gathering" having brought them together!.. As for us, we wait with utmost impatience for the winter nights to pass; no sooner does night spread its dark cloak than a black cloud settles over our breasts, and we take to our beds at nine — or at ten, if we have sat up late... — so as to surrender to sleep and absent ourselves from this tedious life, as like the dead as can be! And if it happens that we spend an evening at a wedding celebration or at the cinema, we come home with constricted breasts, dejected at the loss of the harmony we long for and at the many criticisms we hear!

We live in an age in which the means of comfort, ease, and amusement have all been gathered together — and yet we are too poor to partake of them!

I am speaking of social life in the East, and in our own day, because we stand under the influence of two sweeping currents: the current of true civilization and genuine culture, and the current of worn-out traditions and blind reaction!! This is what fetters us and embitters us, so that we can neither keep pace with the spirit of the age nor manage to follow the ways of the ancients!

By modern social life I understand the life built on the foundations of high refinement and lofty manners, whose hours are divided between the fields of free and honorable work for both sexes, and hours of innocent amusement in attending refined mixed family gatherings — for these are among the social lessons that refine both sexes — and in frequenting the sports clubs which we lack and which we need, so as to reap their bodily and mental fruits, and in attending plays and the historical, literary, and artistic films of the world, attending in the right way, to profit from the pith of what we see and hear, not out of a desire for display and vainglory! But many among us understand modern life — "la vie moderne" — in its distorted sense, imagining that culture and civilization consist in wearing Western fashions and in excess of adornment and finery, and in frequenting gatherings of dancing, gambling, and drinking, while drawing the curtain over our national language, our historical and literary heritage, and our glorious Arab past!

No, and again no! We can reconcile our national Arab life with the requirements of the new life; we can remain guardians of our Eastern stamp and follow modern development in whatever accords with our own particular life and our local environment. But... but we are still in our perilous stage of transition, and its peril has been increased by an incomplete understanding of contemporary life, an understanding built upon the husks... For true modern life is not what many suppose, nor what a large section of the Westerners themselves practice, taking it for a life of licentiousness, extravagance, debauchery, and vice; it is rather the effective, practical life and the refined social life led by the leading men of the nations and their nobles — "the aristocratic class" — whether in Europe or in America or elsewhere.

We are bound to arrive at stability in our lives — but when?.. After we have perished and our bones have crumbled, we the young women of this generation, so that our children may live in comfort upon the traces of our misery?! I am certain that if we had not been educated, had not come into contact with the West, had not understood the spirit of the age rightly, and if a wall had been raised between us and modern civilization, we should never have yearned for it; its tendencies would not have pained us, nor its temptations and its glitter beguiled us; and we should have been happy in ourselves and in our contentment! In this our period of transition, I see that we are the burnt offering for the generations to come — captives of sickly customs and traditions, in a cage studded with precious stones and with splendid bars of gold. Shall we spend our whole lives in this captivity, or will deliverance come to us, so that we are set loose from our bonds and create in our skies an atmosphere of happiness and felicity such as our national traditions and the ordinances of our upright religion approve?