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
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
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
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