Letters

Our correspondent in Stockholm, Miss Elvira Jureidini, wrote in her report on the women's social congress of the countries of the East that the delegation, during its visit to one of the great universities, made the acquaintance of the great orientalist Professor Nyberg, and he went round with them in the famous library, which holds 1,200,000 volumes and ancient Eastern manuscripts — Arabic, Persian, and Greek... These manuscripts were kept in glass cases, lying open for reading — this so that hands should not touch them! How great was our pride when we beheld the works of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Battuta and others, and heard from the orientalist that the Arabic works on medicine, geometry, and the various sciences are counted among the most precious and valuable of books...

The members of the congress also visited the hospital for mild mental and nervous illnesses — for women whom some misfortune has struck and robbed of the pleasure of life, and for pregnant women who are legally entitled to terminate their pregnancies. All of these and others are under medical treatment at the hands of specialists and nurses. What caught my eye was a worker pulling a large cart, in the form of a traveling library, making her rounds among the patients, who choose from it whatever books they please... and this worker is paid a wage by the hour.

Miss Jureidini noted that most of the ladies of Sweden are active, holding official positions, and do most of their housework themselves owing to the scarcity of servants... At a luncheon given by the woman president of one of the great universities, we found that her husband is the director of a well-known bank; and in this university there is a kindergarten set apart for the children of the women students themselves — the mother enrolls at the university and places her child in its kindergarten, close by her; and this situation is quite ordinary in Sweden, with nothing strange about it at all!

The president of the congress asked her, at one of its subsidiary gatherings, to say something about my country — on condition that she not touch on politics! So she spoke of the beauty of Lebanon, the number of its schools, the character of its people, their clubs and their associations; and I would not but end my remarks with a call for peace in the Holy Land and a description of the condition of the refugees and the homelessness and loss they endure.

In early September we visited a school for maids, and it is astonishing how much care is taken in the preparation of good maids, training them in all the affairs of household management... From there we visited a school for "massage" and the beautifying of the face; the students were young in years and possessed of great courtesy and cheerfulness.

Most of the schools in Sweden are in the charge of the government, though they were originally founded by the efforts of individual persons or of women's associations. The government spends generously on its institutes to give their students recreation and to fit them for a secure future, and it directs each into a specialty according to individual inclination. In the girls' schools the government takes care to equip the girl with everything she will need in her married and practical life.

The congress has finished its first session, which comprised observational visits to the scientific institutes, the hospitals, and the various factories of Sweden, and has begun its second session, which comprises the study of the social program that is the principal aim of this congress...

This is a summary of what has reached us from our delegate to the congress in Sweden. The Woman's Voice thanks Miss Elvira Jureidini and hopes she will continue her activity as a writer and send us the results of this useful congress.

The brilliant Mr. Mohammad al-Baalbaki, editor-in-chief of our great colleague "Kull Shay," is showing notable activity in the course of his journey to London with the press delegation, and he neglects no side of literary and social activity in England, for all the abundance and richness of those sides. The letters he sends every week to his paper, "Kull Shay," show that Mr. al-Baalbaki is intent on studying the general sides of the life of the English people.

Nor does the editor-in-chief of Kull Shay forget to write from time to time to the editor-in-chief of Dar al-Kitab, acquainting him with women's activity in England; and The Woman's Voice will publish important reports of his on the women's movement in the land of the English in its coming issues.

In one of his recent letters to "The Woman's Voice" he says:
"If only we were together here, in this wondrous country, for you to behold the manifestations of immortal life...
How I have choked with anguish as I watched the huge statues raised in the great squares to the poets of the world and its great writers!

In every corner an elegant statue reminds you that the place where it stands is an immortal place.
We visited Shakespeare's house, in his immortal town; the whole world streams in to visit this town in which the world's greatest poet was born... Here is his wife's house — she is immortal like him.
Will a house, I wonder, ever be raised among us in Lebanon for a poet's wife, or for a poet?

Miss Nahida Fadli addresses the rising young girls in this delicate essay, and in it is a call to the free life — the life of resplendent youth looking out upon the spring with a radiant smile and a bright, glowing hope.
The editorial staff of "The Woman's Voice" observes that the new girl has begun to feel that she too

is called to take part practically in the goodness and beauty of this life; and indeed, there have passed over the girl among us periods in which she lived pensive and gloomy, in constant frowning and anxiety...

My sisters:

You, and you alone, are responsible for the springtime of your lives. Let her among you who wishes to enjoy her youth laugh; and let her who desires to greet the autumn of her life frown....

This is what I have wished to say and to repeat: the most wasted of life's days is a day in which one does not laugh. Laughter is a thing that joins pleasure and profit together — so why should we be gloomy? Every tragedy that crosses the spring of our lives is but a summer cloud, and it clears away. So, by God, answer me! Are we the first ever to meet with troubles, or the last who will meet them? Such is life; and the happiest of us is she who can laugh at herself and make her own person an object of her own mockery.

Would that every one of us knew that nothing is more deadly to the soul than its feeling of its weakness, its insignificance, and its small worth — and that nothing makes it feel its insignificance like frowning! Then she would never frown at all, and would open her jaws wide for a ringing laugh.

I have not yet laughed from a pure depth of the heart, but I have manufactured laughter for myself, for I have long tried to persuade myself that I am happy and that I must laugh — not that yellow, bitter laugh, nor that laugh full of mockery of others, of ridicule of them or gloating over them, for such laughs can never see happiness nor even feel it once in a lifetime!.. What laughs, then, are these that I laugh? They are none other than the laughs of jest, of evening company, or of humor, which give the inner muscles of the abdomen a gentle massage that aids the ease of digestion and regulates the secretions of the circulation of the blood, and which give the nervous system that rest and refreshment which guarantee health and soundness.

■

In an article of deep thought and sober style, showing a sound and conscious national bent, Mr. Georges Nasri Safir replies to an article which the cultured woman of letters Miss Rose Ghorayeb published in The Woman's

Voice under the title "Does Lebanon Have a Mission?" in the September issue.

In answer to this question, Mr. Safir says that Lebanon has no mission to this day, and will have no mission until we raise, upon the ruins of the chaos and flabbiness of our social existence, a conscious, organized, solid social edifice; and that from here, and from here alone, will come our modern point of departure in the arena of civilizations...

The writer denies that there is in Lebanon today anything that may be called a reform movement, for there will be no reform until we begin by blasting away all the traditional conditions on which the Lebanese still rely in their society... The writer ends by saying:

This is not what we want our mission to be. Nor is it, in relation to the absolute, to the abstract, a mission — even if, in relation to what others accomplish, it is something worth mentioning.

That some of us emigrate to Egypt and spend their talents in the profession of journalism, excelling the Egyptians of

the same profession, does not mean that we have a mission in the world of journalism.

That linguists arise among us who improve the rules of the language and simplify them does not mean that we have a mission in the world of language.

That our musical institutes perform Western music and spread its teaching does not mean that we have a mission in the sphere of art.

We had missions in the past which we discharged with all our strength and sincerity, so that their memory was immortalized and there was recorded for us a precious heritage which is today our national capital:

The day we lit the world with the light of knowledge, when we spread the letters of the alphabet along the shores of the Mediterranean, which was in that day a colony of our young civilization. The day we armed the peoples with our necessary inventions — the making of glass, the art of dyeing, the building of ships, and the skillful arts of war.

The day we filled the hearts of humanity with spiritual teachings, restoring confidence to souls that had despaired, and faith — in the world and all it holds — to hearts that had denied.

The day we carried the torch of the Greek and Roman civilizations and bore it through the Dark Ages, lit with our oil, until we delivered it to the Europeans, and by its light they awoke from their deep slumber.

To world missions such as these, in the realm of civilization, we are called today — while the West flounders — to cut our path and to produce.

And our hope of answering this call rests upon the success of the mission of the living, strong, superior elements in the nation, to spread through it that renaissance which will serve as the spiritual spur driving us to the forefront of the procession of civilizations.

Georges Nasri Safir

And here is a letter addressed by the national poet Mr. Ajaj al-Mukhtar to Sheikh Khalil Takieddine, in which he directs his attention to this popular strain of literature, a precious inheritance in our life:

"Perhaps the one successful thing the Lebanese government has done, by way of putting a thing in its proper place, is its charging of the great writer Mr. Khalil Takieddine with the organizing of the departments of Radio Lebanon.

And if the directorate of broadcasting needs to be blasted from its foundations and built anew, Mr. Khalil possesses such means of blasting and demolition and such equipment of construction and rebuilding — resolve, experience, art, and sincerity — as guarantee us brilliant results and will place the Lebanese broadcasting station in the front rank of the world's distinguished stations.

And there is no doubt that the native strain — zajal, or national verse, or popular literature — will receive a generous glance from the watchful eye of Khalil, for the native strain stands in need of organization and attention more than all the other strains of Lebanese broadcasting.

This sweet native strain, which our children utter by instinct, which our mothers sing to their children in the cradle, and which great and small among us love. This beautiful strain, without whose refreshing tunes no wedding in our country has any gladness, and no funeral any grandeur without its plaintive melodies.

Our great writer, who savors fine zajal to the utmost degree, will without doubt banish from the broadcasting apparatus all the intruders, and with his penetrating, luminous insight he will discover the truly gifted and draw them near to Lebanese radio to display their stored-up talents; and by this work he will satisfy his living conscience, true art, and the tastes of the listeners.

Across the long generations we intoxicated the world with the airs of our popular songs and our zajal strains, and we must return