Who Is the Criminal?

Readers will remember the story that The Woman's Voice published by Mrs. Salma al-Haffar under the title 'Who Is the Criminal?' The writer Salma al-Haffar had asked readers to declare their opinions as to who the real criminal in the story was, and two letters have reached us: the first from Miss Zaynab Mahmud Yasin, of Safita, and the second from the writer Taha al-Gharib, of the newspaper Le Commerce du Levant.

Here is Miss Zaynab's letter. She said:

The Criminal...

After reading the story 'Waiting' in the last issue of the esteemed magazine The Woman's Voice, my attention was caught by this tragedy performed by three protagonists — a mother, a lover, and a son — which The Woman's Voice placed in the hands of its readers, men and women, that they might judge which of the three is the criminal. Faced with this welcome referendum, I paused to review the position of each

of them; it moved me deeply as a whole, and I came away wondering who the criminal could be.

A loving woman whose heart beats with the verses of love, with its sanctity and its purity, falls victim to the wishes of her parents, yet keeps the ember of this love alight in fidelity to a penniless sweetheart whom the parents did not want as kin to her; and loyalty remains buried within the folds of her breast. The days pass, the husband dies, and the two lovers return to their old nest, exchanging the cups of love and passion.

And when the magnificent, musical kiss of reunion came, in which the two lovers were long lost, there began the intimate talk out of which the sorrowful tragedy burst. The loving woman is compelled, by the force of things, to open her arms to her adoring sweetheart and to offer him the cup of passion from her lips.

And the lover, too, is likewise compelled to answer this situation with his love and with his heart. But the criminal, of course, is the son, who never considered that his mother had enjoyed absolute freedom from the moment his father died — that she had become free in her conduct and her course. Yes, he alone is the sinful criminal, when he left his mother in a vengeful manner, trusting in his certainty that his mother was dying of love for him and melting with longing for him; and so from him came that bitter revenge with which he struck that cruel blow at two loving hearts.

Safita: Bayt al-Sheikh Yunus
Zaynab Mahmud Yasin

...whose days have been free of such situations. And if we wish to pass judgment on one of them, we must picture ourselves in their place, so that our judgment may come out just.

The son did the best that a son could do toward his mother, for he refused to let himself live with a mother who had a lover, and refused to be a stumbling block in the way of the happiness of a woman who had given so much for his own happiness.

And the mother — that woman who was married off against her will at the age of innocence, whose husband then died, and to whom her first sweetheart returned — he upon whom, five years before, she had pinned her fondest hopes — returning today to tell her that he too had married, to console himself after she had married and made him lose all hope; and then he wept, and she wept with him, over a happiness the two of them had lost and a married life they had been denied — that woman's thirst for a little happiness in life was stronger than any restraint of honor or chastity or fidelity that might hold her back from quenching the burning of her breast.

And if there is any sin here (and I do not say crime), it falls upon the lover, who ought to have been of loftier character and more continent soul, and to have accepted what God had written for him — a life with

And here is the second letter:

To the literary lady, Mrs. Salma al-Haffar
Madam,

I would not have thought that you would confine the crime to the mother, the lover, and the son, whose hands are clean of anything that may be called crime — though all three of them did what would be counted a fault by anyone

the partner of his life, she whom he married that he might be hers and no one else's. Rather, he ought to have asked himself, before going to his sweetheart, whether she would have returned this love of his had her husband still been alive? — And if his love for that woman had been of a kind that required us to find excuses for him, he would not have hastened to marry when he learned that his beloved had been married off, against her will, to a wealthy man; and had he refrained, it would have been open to him to marry that woman lawfully after she lost her husband.

As for the crime that caused the misery of a mother, and the misery of a son of whom we do not know whether he took his own life or perished a vagrant in the alleys, and the wretchedness of a man living with a woman he does not love, and consequently the wretchedness of that wife (the lover's wife) who spent the flower of her life with a husband who lived with his mistress (the author neglected to inform us whether the lover deserted his wife after his attachment to his mistress, or whether that wife spent twelve years with a man of whom she had nothing but his name) — that crime, which dragged misery into the lives of two families, falls with all its consequences upon the mother's father, who refused to marry her, in the days when she was a girl, to the one she loved and who loved her, and preferred to offer his daughter as merchandise in the market of the wealthy fools.

Taha al-Gharib

And a letter full of sincere feeling and suppressed pain has been sent to us by Miss Nahida Fadli, one of our beloved Palestinian guests. Miss Fadli enclosed with it some poems of her own composition, in which a soft poetic spirit appears, though it is still tender yet; and we have chosen from Miss Fadli this prose piece, in the hope that she will always favor us with the outpourings of her pen, for in her pen