Mr. Musa Sulayman, director of Arabic studies in the preparatory section of the American University of Beirut, has brought out this collection of Arabic stories, and has thereby rendered the rising generation a service that will be remembered to his credit and for which he deserves thanks.
Mr. Sulayman has divided the Arabic story material in the old literature according to a new classification which we have known in no other scholar, and it is a felicitous classification to a very great degree. These divisions rest upon a sound basis of understanding of the Arabic story, and they smooth away, before students of Arabic literature, an obstacle that used to rise in their path whenever they tried to acquaint themselves with the Arabic story material and could not, since it lay out of reach in its absorbing primary sources.
The book "Tales of the Arabs" has come out as a story collection arranged under a fine, scholarly classification, and divided into different categories of story, each of which the author has prefaced with a short analytical study, showing the student the color of these tales and their artistic and literary value. And the reader may well marvel when he sees Mr. Sulayman devote a special chapter of his book to the religious story, giving delightful examples of it such as only those deeply versed in the study of storytelling among the Arabs would know.
Arabic literature stands in urgent need of specialists who will survey it with the eye of a critic, the mind of a scholar, and the spirit of a believer, so as to set out from it models fit for our sons and daughters, that they may take eagerly to learning their language and studying it, after having shunned it for so long a time.
And Mr. Musa Sulayman has succeeded in these models he presents in his new book "Tales of the Arabs" — an absorbing, useful collection, showing taste, understanding, and a grasp of what the rising Arab generation needs.
This is a collection of stories turning for the most part on feeling — the feeling of youth, and all that is in youth of eagerness, ambition, and adventure.
Nor is Suhayl Idris an unknown writer in the world of the story; he is a man of letters in whose soul a strong yearning for the short story has sprung up. Before this collection he brought out the collection "Ashwaq," which many of the rising men of letters of this country took up with criticism, analysis, and celebration. And "Fires and Snows" is a beautiful title for the story with which Mr. Idris opens this collection of his. In it he tells of a hidden love, wearing the outward show of defiance and pride, between a young man and a young woman, students of law; then this love — or say rather, this deadly coldness between the young man and the girl — took to the snows of Sannine, on a sporting excursion; and behold, the white snows of Sannine bear witness to those fires that were devouring the heart of the young man and the girl.
And in this collection there is another story, which is the beginning of a violent revolt that has begun to thunder in the souls of the eager young Arabs: the story "Martyrdom," in which the writer Idris treats those real, rebellious forces that work in the depths of a young boy, in quiet and calm, after the unjust partition decision — whereupon he leaves his easy life in the arms of his mother and father, to carry the rifle in defense of Palestine.
In this collection, too, is another story I should like to single out, and which may in itself be a new color in the story: the story "Echoes." These echoes are nothing but the echoes of the conscience that does not sleep, the echoes of the crime for which no eye can close, whose
blood remains upon the hand, the heart, and the eye.
Indeed, the story "Echoes" is the beginning of a point of departure for Suhayl Idris, for in it he has freed himself, to a great extent, from those narrow bounds he has drawn about most of his stories — the bounds of meager feeling, and of that bodily and emotional self-sufficiency in which the soul circles about an emptiness of action, filled, if at all, by a kiss or by a letter.
We hope that Suhayl Idris will tear the masks from his imagination — and let him tear them off boldly and stubbornly — for his imagination is a prisoner, his feeling is cold, and his characters are statues... And let him always remember the advice of his friend "Said Takieddine," for I know no better counsel than his for this rising young man; nor do I know, among the storytellers behind whom fame ripens at such speed as it does behind Suhayl Idris, one in greater need of life...
A book written by Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting in the world, and rendered into Arabic, in a bright, beautiful, simple style, by Mr. Rashid Shuqayr. The author says, in the preface to the fourteenth edition, that scouting is an educational revolution whose purpose is the renewal of life in the open air; and we may regard scouting as a movement completing the preparation given by the school — indeed, it is a school that prepares man for an active, working life by way of reliance on nature.
And in presenting this book to the readers of Arabic, its translator renders a service to the Arab world, which is in the direst need of these solid educational foundations, to build for it a generation of strong soldiers who will spread through the world the message of brotherhood, love, and cooperation.
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