Musings...

The pre-Islamic age was the age of chivalry and poetry. It traced for the Arabs the path of their life, directed their inclinations, formed their character, and left the deepest imprint on their souls. And despite their effort to renew their ideals after leaving the Peninsula and adopting the principles of Islam, their souls remained attached to the desert: they yearned for it, hallowed its traditions, took after its poets, and made it the source of their inspiration. Though they tried to forget the age of polytheism and efface its traces, they departed from its ideals only a little.

It is no wonder that the desert should have this far-reaching effect upon the souls of the Arabs. It was the desert that taught them boldness and endurance in battle, and bred in their souls that hardness which made their great conquests possible. It was the cradle of their poetry and the theater of their raids and of their glorious "days," in which every tribe delighted to boast and take pride. That vast open space which stirs awe and awakens dreams; in which a man roams at his pleasure, free of the fetters of civilization, with no companion but his sword and his she-camel; he eats the herbs of the earth and scorns to beg; when hungry he moves on, or plunders a caravan; he thrills to the call for succor and to giving, and feeds others out of love of it; his tongue breaks into poetry at every occasion, and if he hears what displeases him, he flares up and stirs his sword.

Two qualities of the pre-Islamic Arabs captivated them in particular: their skill in war and the fluency of their tongues; and to these two distinctions they clung. But with their removal from the Peninsula and their inclination toward a life of luxury, they began gradually to lose the warlike distinction under the influence of their surroundings, and nothing remained to them of the old Arabs but verbal brilliance — which likewise lost its magic with the passing of the years, through the tyranny of imitation and the spread of artifice and rigidity. Even so, no one denies the Arabs of today their verbal brilliance, though this brilliance is still stamped with a literary, poetic stamp that does not keep pace with the requirements of the modern age. We observe likewise that the custom of the blood-feud, still rife among us, which makes revenge a sacred duty upon every member of the injured family, is nothing but a relic of pre-Islamic times. Indeed the scholar Weulersse, in his book "The Peasants of Syria and the Near East," goes further than this. He holds that the Arab conquest stamped these lands with their present character, and that the Arab countries were never free of the influence of nomadism at any stage of their history, above all in the ages of decline; and one consequence of this influence was the spread among them of contempt for agriculture and industry, and the preference of commerce over them.

In their pre-Islamic days the Arabs were among the peoples furthest removed from industry, since the materials needed for it were not to be found in their land. Most of them were nomads who paid no heed to agriculture and knew of it nothing but the raising of livestock, on which they depended for their food, their journeys, and their clothing, and for whose sake they wandered in search of water and pasture. But since their country was a passage between two continents, touching the sea on one side and the land on the other, it became a road for caravans and a corridor for the trade routes between India on the one hand and Syria and Egypt on the other. The caravans had trading stations such as Mecca, and the Arabs worked in trade: some as guides of caravans, some as merchants who bought goods and carried them on their camels between the Peninsula and Syria; and Quraysh had its two journeys, of summer and of winter. Thanks to this commercial activity, wealth multiplied among them in the towns and the standing of merchants grew so great that they said: "He who is not a merchant is nothing in their eyes."

Yet if we set commerce beside the other sources of wealth — I mean industry and agriculture — we shall find that preferring it over them is dangerous and short-sighted. Commerce is the pursuit of money by the shortest and least toilsome roads, and it often relies on fraud and deception, on pushing goods or pushing words. As a source of wealth it is a weak and unstable door, for it depends on agriculture

and industry and has no life without them. And if it depends on goods from abroad — as was the case in the Arabian Peninsula, and as is the case with us in Lebanon — then reliance upon it is exposed to fluctuation and extinction; for that outside world may cut off its goods from us or send them by another road, or the country's wealth may run out and it can no longer consume. That is why we see that when the trade route shifted away from the Arabian Peninsula to the sea, the trade of the Arabs vanished and their livelihood with it, so that they were driven to emigrate and plunged deep into conquest. Agriculture and industry, meanwhile, are two honorable sources of livelihood. The tiller earns his bread by the sweat of his brow: he plows the earth and sows it, and it yields him its bounties; he cleaves the soil, subdues the rock, beautifies nature, and rejoices in the fruits of his labor. His livelihood is steady: if he is faithful to the land, it is faithful to him. And in his work he is independent and proud of soul, with no need of the flattery to which the merchant resorts.

Industry, likewise, is a means of displaying man's artistic gifts and of immortalizing his achievements. The craftsman creates beauty and adds to the earth's delight. He toils to acquire his skill, and may not earn enough to suffice him; but he finds his reward in the inward pleasure he feels when his work is done and he enjoys the sight of his handiwork. Industry and agriculture are both means of elevating character in a manner the merchant never attains, and both are a permanent source of wealth exposed to none of the hazards of trade.

It is not easy to encompass the causes that led to the decline of agriculture and industry in the Arab lands; the likelihood is that it is one aspect of the general decline that befell these countries from the twelfth century onward, and that the influence of nomadism is only one of the causes, not all of them. But the painful truth is that this decline exists, and that most of our countries' wealth is in the hands of great merchants or great landowners — and this is poverty itself. For the life of a country depends not on the wealth of a numbered few, but on every one of its individuals enjoying what guarantees him the means of a decent living. And this is not to be found: industries and crafts of every kind are few or lacking. Here is our peasant spending seven months of the year with nothing to do but sit by the fire, when he might spend the months of idleness at some craft, like the peasants of the rest of the civilized world.

If you cast your eye over the streets of Beirut you will see no small number of Kurdish and Arab beggars. But look about you: do you see a single Armenian beggar? You will not find one. For every Armenian child learns a trade from his tenderest years, and some learn two trades, so that if one goes slack he plies the other. And there are crafts for which the Armenians have become famous and which they have almost monopolized in Lebanon, such as photography, embroidery, music, and advertising design, to which may be added watch repairing and shoemaking.

Our government did well when it narrowed the field of success before the baccalaureate students and sought to confine the certificate to a select elite; but it ought at the same time to have eased for these students the means of earning a living by roads other than the baccalaureate and government employment — namely, by opening for them a sufficient number of industrial and vocational schools.

As for the life of the tiller, it is a life of hardship and misery. He lives on the margin of existence, with no contact with the city save on rare occasions. His way of living and his farming methods differ in nothing from what they were three thousand years ago. He toils for others, since as a rule the land does not belong to him. Plant diseases ravage his trees and his vegetables, and his labor goes for nothing; and he finds no one to concern himself with his case, for the owner of the land is in the city, busy with his trade, and the government is distracted from him by its own problems.

These are musings prompted in me by the reading of a book by a foreign scholar on the condition of the peasant in the Arab lands, in which the author showed, with facts and figures, how the misery and ignorance of the peasant constitute the gravest problem in these lands, which depend on agriculture for their life, and in which the peasant makes up some eighty percent of the population.

I thought to set them down, in the hope that those who hold up to us the desert ideals in letters of light may temper their excess, turn the eyes of the rising generation toward the practical side so neglected among us — the side of agriculture and industry — and teach them skill of hand before skill of tongue.

Perhaps I shall return to Weulersse's book on another occasion.