How My Husband Fell in Battle

My friend Salwa asked me to describe for the readers of the esteemed magazine The Woman's Voice my thoughts and my feelings regarding the misfortune that befell my husband Anwar; and in answering this request I wish to set down two preliminary points by way of apology for answering it at all. The first is that a person's feelings, as it seems to me, are to a large degree a private thing that does not bear "airing" in ordinary circumstances — I say in ordinary circumstances; but the circumstances we are now concerned with are circumstances out of the ordinary. The second point is that I do not consider the misfortune that struck Anwar unique of its kind or important in itself — although Anwar, naturally, is the unique one of his age and time and the most important thing in this existence — after God, glorified and exalted be He.

As for the incident itself, it is this: while my husband was doing his duty as an Arab citizen on the outskirts of Jerusalem, he was struck by a bullet in his left leg which severed the artery and led to a series of distressing operations, and in the end to the amputation of that leg.

I was at the time in sister Lebanon with my children, where I had come, after intense insistence, about a week before the end of the British Mandate, to safeguard the children's lives and the health of their nerves after Jerusalem had become the scene of continuous battle, caused by the scramble of Arabs and Jews to occupy whatever strategic positions could be occupied, so as to be in a position to deliver the decisive blow after the English left the country. This was the immediate cause of the battle of Qatamon, in which the Arabs, under the command of the peasant hero Ibrahim Abu Dayya (now lying wounded in one of the hospitals of Cairo), fought the defense of dauntless heroes: two hundred of them succeeded in holding off upwards of two thousand Jews for five successive days, until all of them but seven were killed or wounded. Anwar, in his capacity as secretary of the National Committee in Jerusalem, was in constant and practical contact with these operations, and in them he received his first wound, in his right arm — fortunately a slight wound which he noticed only after coming home at night; and after he complained of a pain in his arm and we insisted upon calling the doctor, the doctor came and extracted the small splinter that had entered his arm — and I understood later that he had escaped death by a miracle. And so, when I left Jerusalem to come to Lebanon, I had prepared myself to receive whatever shocks might come to me, having committed Anwar and my whole affair to God. There were, in addition to what I have said, two psychological factors that helped me (after the religious factor, naturally) to take up this attitude. The first is that I do not believe there is a Palestinian family that has not been stricken during the past generation with the loss of abundant wealth and of dear men in our desperate struggle to defend our existence and preserve the Arab character of our beloved country. Sacrifice on this path — be it much or little — has therefore become (and I do not say this in boastfulness but in confirmation of fact) one of the things to which the Arab citizen in Palestine has grown accustomed and which he has begun to accept — if not with an entirely open heart, then at all events with calm and composure. Neither I nor my family, thank God, were among those whom fortune exempted from this all-embracing rule, and so I was reared in an atmosphere saturated with this spirit. As for the second factor, it is that we in Palestine had begun to feel — and I believe that if this feeling were to spread through the rest of the Arab countries and become a fixed conviction with them as it is with us, the Palestine question would be solved once and for all — we had begun to feel, I say, that this is the last chance before us to prove our existence, to impose our sovereignty, and to preserve the heritage of our fathers and forefathers; and therefore we were prepared to sacrifice to the utmost degrees of sacrifice, so that we might come out of this decisive battle victorious. I had taken from Anwar, and accepted, the theory in which he believed with absolute faith: that sacrifice in time of crisis must be proportionate to the degree of enjoyment in time of peace — a theory springing from the principle that he who would have his rights must bear the responsibilities arising from those rights. His view therefore was that the class of the educated and the rich may not leave our peasant to carry the burden of the battle alone; they must go before him — go before him — and guide him in every field — in every field — and not only in the field of political declarations. As for the plea that they have not been trained in one kind of work though they are proficient in another, it is true; and the answer to it is that they should begin their training quickly — especially when we find that what most of them are proficient in is political direction and nothing else, and especially when we remember that our poor peasant has been trained in nothing at all — not even in political direction itself — and when we remember, finally, that malignant Zionism has tried, and still tries, to drive the wedge of corruption between the peasant and the class of the educated and the rich (they have changed their "tune" now, and have begun sowing corruption between the Palestinians and their Arab brothers in the rest of the Arab countries, alleging that the Palestinians are not enemies of Zionism, but that it is the ambitions of the imperialist Arab states that drive them to resist it, and that they invaded Palestine for that reason). And as a result of

these factors — the factor of habit and the factor of necessity — I had prepared myself, as I said, to receive news of Anwar with the calm such news deserves in circumstances like these. Yet when the shock actually fell, it had the effect of a thunderbolt, and perhaps the immediate cause of the weakness I showed at first was that I did not believe the messenger when he said Anwar was wounded, and thought he was only trying to break the news of his martyrdom to me by degrees.

I went to the hospital at Nablus and found Anwar in a state nearer to death than to life — but God, glorified and exalted be He, was gracious to us, and his health began to improve, until one day he said to me:
"A condition that was almost fundamental to the contract we signed has lapsed. Do you wish to annul it?"
"And what contract and what condition do you mean?"

"The marriage contract, naturally." As for the condition, it is that you contracted to marry a man complete in all his limbs — and now, as you see...

I looked at him a long while, until I was sure that he was joking as is his habit; then we both laughed — and I thought how proud I am of Anwar, because he did not content himself with propounding theories — and he had many theories. Then I looked toward the door of the room and saw the throngs of the wounded moving through the corridors of the hospital — and I said to myself: Praise be to God who created me an Arab woman — praise be to God who sent us the plague of Zionism ("and it may be that you hate a thing though it is good for you"), for it has rubbed our metal upon the touchstone and proved it to be pure gold. How proud I am of you, O fighters — and how proud I am of you, O noble Arab people!