Dear Iqbal...

By God, I can advise you only with what Abu al-Tayyib said — may God rest his soul:

Let no enemy's tears deceive you; have mercy on your youth against an enemy, and mercy shall be shown you.

Lofty honor is not safe from harm until blood is spilled along its sides.

Or with what legend has handed down about the man who turned Christian: the sheikh said of him, "He does not diminish the number of Muslims by a single man," whereupon his friend the priest hastened to add, in agreement, "Nor does he increase the number of Christians..."

You would have me, my dear, solve for you this problem which you claim is so thorny that it has no solution except your accepting him as a husband once more — after he cast you far away and never looked at you or at your only child throughout the past five years.

Leave him — let him go to hell. Perhaps, just as he brought evil and ruin upon the sons of his own town, he will bring upon those whose tracks he followed the same shame and disgrace he brought upon us... For he in whom there is no good for his own people and his homeland — rest assured — there is no good in him for his enemies either!! And to lighten your heart I shall tell you a story that resembles your own. It happened to one of my school friends, whom I met recently; she told me her tale — a tale which, as you will see, breaks the heart with grief and sorrow...

You must surely have met him — the man with the disheveled hair and the patched, tattered clothes, who carries on his chest a drum bearing a tray on which a foreign flag is fixed. Sometimes he stands on Jaffa Street in the city of Jerusalem, at the point that separates the Arab quarter from the Jewish quarter... and sometimes he cuts through the Jewish streets, the sound of a drum about him like a death-knell announcing a calamity... And he remains this way from dawn until he has bidden farewell to the first watch of the night, so as to obtain the few piasters with which to drive off the pangs of hunger that rarely leave him!

This man, with his gray, disheveled hair, who looks

as though he has entered the sixth decade of his life — you would be astonished to learn that he has not yet passed thirty.

This is the man I shall tell you about, whose story resembles the story of your husband, and the story of many whom glittering gold and wanton Israelite women have led astray...

Ali — for that is the name of the hero of our story — was the son of the sheikh of the village of ( . . ), who enjoyed great influence among the people of his town. He never left the village for the city except when his father sent him to represent him in the government offices or at the popular festivals which his father, in his old age, could no longer attend.

One day Ali was obliged to spend the night in the city of Jerusalem, and he chose the "Hotel Lebanon" as his refuge for that night, for he was certain from its name that it was an Arab hotel...

He sat in the hall of the "Hotel Lebanon" eating his supper in some contentment! For near his table stood another table at which sat a girl straight and slender as a lance, with great dark eyes, a mouth of pearls, and finely arched brows — uniting in herself the magic of the eye, the beauty of a painting, and the splendor of imagination...

And this beauty kept moving about, strutting through the hotel's spacious halls with movements that were all allurement.

The clock struck twelve, then one, then two after midnight, and Ali wrestled with drowsiness and mastered it! He remained open-eyed, his mind astray, flying in a delicious fancy that hovered about the hall where he had eaten his supper...

At eight o'clock the next morning he awoke to violent shaking... He began rubbing his eyes to open them... and there he was, staring as though he had fallen from a height!! His heartbeats quickened, his breathing rose, and he was dumbfounded, as if possessed, when he saw himself before yesterday's beauty, a cup of coffee in her hands and a sweet smile on her lips. She said to him in broken Arabic:

— Good morning, khawaja...

— Good... morning!! But...

He looked at her with the look of one astonished and inquiring, and, as though she knew what was passing through his mind, she replied: