Toward a Higher Press

Our poverty in literary and scientific journalism is a well-known matter. While political journalism runs riot among us — so that Beirut can support forty-five political newspapers every day — we find that the literary papers in the whole of Lebanon do not reach the number of one's fingers, and scientific papers are nonexistent. As for the causes of this poverty, the chief among them are the scantiness of encouragement and people's turning away from acquiring books and buying the papers that treat of science and literature. You see them reading the political papers out of a desire to learn the local news and the political developments in the world; as for anything else, it does not interest them to read it. Nor is the material poverty they plead the first cause that keeps us from encouraging journalism and literary production; rather, we have not yet grown accustomed to spending on this kind of luxury! I notice, for instance, in the schools that the boy and girl students spend lavishly on sweets, and that their parents encourage them to eat to the point of surfeit and excess, but they rarely place in their hands anything to spend on buying books and reading the papers. They count no nourishment but material nourishment.

Another cause is the competition of the foreign papers and magazines, which flood our markets as foreign goods flood them, choking our production and paralyzing our movement. Had our local press possessed any measure of strength, the foreigners' papers could not have competed with it — for the attraction of the local stamp is no secret — but the weak cannot stand against the strong, though every means of temptation and charm be at its disposal.

But alongside all these causes there is one principal cause that leaves our literary and scientific journalism feeble and meager — and that is the prevalence of the method of improvisation and the want of depth among our men of letters, following the manner of the political journalists who black the pages of an entire newspaper in a few hours and push it to the printer.

Al-Jahiz, in one of his epistles defending the Arabs, says: everything with the Arabs is spontaneity and improvisation, as if it were inspiration; there is no toil in it and no travail; it is only that a man turns his mind toward speech... and the words come to him in flights, and the meanings pour in upon him in streams...

And I believe al-Jahiz was mistaken in this description, which he thought raised the standing of the Arabs. For in the Jahiliyya they used to study the poems of those who came before them and compete in transmission and memorization, and no poet among them rose to distinction, neither among the ancients nor among the later men, except after he had strained himself in study and reading, in long patience and travail — until it was said that Abu Nuwas transmitted the verse of sixty women among the poetesses of the Arabs, not counting the men.

And even if we supposed that improvisation held good in certain ages, it does not hold good in ours. The cultivated reader — and who wants ignorant readers? — asks of us today that we stir his thinking, acquaint him with things he does not know, polish his taste and his feeling, and fill his soul with gladness and dreams; and all of this demands hard labor and long effort, a storing-up of knowledge, a broad and balanced culture, and a refinement and maturity of personality in the writer who shoulders the responsibility of educating readers and widening their knowledge.

Political journalism is an art demanding experience and taste in the arranging of news, good selection and comment, and the drawing of attention by headlines and short, enticing phrases. But the journalism of science and letters is something other than this. True, it demands taste and art in arrangement and a polished appearance, but that is a quite secondary matter; more important than it is a deep, modern culture resting on the newest scientific books and the best primary sources, furnished by broad and exact investigation of society's conditions and needs, together with power of observation, penetrating insight, and a taste polished by culture — neither inborn nor improvised, but firm in its direction and solid in its foundation.

The enemy of journalism is of two kinds. One is the oratorical, frenzied press, which exploits the reader's simplicity and bewitches him with high-sounding phrases and ringing speeches; he reads it astonished and spellbound, and judges not the meanings but the words, and so remains under their influence without feeling that what he has read is empty talk and hollow phrases. The second kind is the commercial press, which abounds in ornament and embellishment, using colors and flourishes, striking at the reader's weak points and sinking to the level of the mob, publishing everything apt to arouse curiosity or move the emotions and inflame the senses. Papers of this sort are fit for every color of propaganda, because they work not toward an ideal cultural end but for trade, gain, and advertisement; and their like has multiplied in this age of propaganda in which we live. As for the first kind — the oratorical press — it abounded at the beginning of the renaissance, and traces of it still remain today.

I recall a number of women's papers that appeared at one time in Lebanon and Syria and lived as long as they could satisfy a public

that puts the word before the meaning, takes its ease in oratorical articles, and is delighted by a downpour of words and a torrent of phrases. But they began to wither away when readers began to open their eyes; and no doubt material insufficiency hastened the passing of these papers — but for that, they could have lived longer, for many of our readers even today judge an article by its words rather than its meanings. And, upon my life, how great would our poverty in women's journalism be had not the Lebanese Women's League risen to establish the magazine "The Woman's Voice," opening thereby to woman the field of contributing to what Arabic journalism ought to be.

And in spite of that, our poverty in women's journalism is still severe.

Nor do I forget here the part played by the schools and their responsibility for this poverty. Our girls' schools are unable to furnish the sound type of cultivated woman. What we observe with regret is that our girls' passion for aping the French exceeds that of the boys, and that their fondness for speaking foreign languages — sometimes without reading them — kills in them every inclination to master their own language, or to read it, or to write in it. And we observe, on the other hand, that the few who have had the chance, by one means or another, to master this language have not had the chance of a rich modern culture from which to draw inspiration when they write; so their ideas remain feeble, and imitation and banality prevail in them.

We do not ask the girls' schools to prepare women journalists for us. That is the business of schools of journalism. But it is their duty to prepare women who master their language in a modern fashion, tinged with taste and with the modern renewal of style, drawing from the sciences and letters of the foreigners nourishment and richness, just as it draws from the sciences and letters of our forebears a firebrand and an inspiration.

But where are our schools? Have we schools of our own to establish, to control, or to direct? I fear this subject would drag us into dwelling at length on a painful matter — so let us stop here.