Mai and Woman

A few days ago, amid the din of UNESCO in Lebanon, a memorial gathering was held for the great Mai at Radio Lebanon, at which a number of women and men of letters spoke, and some newspapers published ample articles on the great woman of Arab letters... But that gathering and those articles were lost in the din of those days...

A select group of writers in this country has undertaken to work with the Egyptian and Lebanese governments to return the remains of "Mai" to the regions where she grew up... that Mai may return to Lebanon, that the bones of "Mai" may return to Lebanon... And it is enough for the writers of Lebanon, from Lebanon, that Lebanon remembers them as bones turned to dust...

In no age of its history has the Middle East known a woman who played the role that "Mai" Ziadeh played in the two fields of literature and society.

Mai Ziadeh opened her eyes and saw the Eastern woman in general, and the Arab woman in particular, groaning under a heavy burden of ignorance, servitude, and convention. She saw her as a paltry commodity of no consequence, with no opinion and no direction. Her wounded feminine pride rose up to avenge the daughters of her sex — and in deed: she vowed to herself to strive for their advancement and their emancipation, or die...

In Egypt, Qasim Amin was speaking, writing, and giving direction without respite along this path, and "Bahithat al-Badiya" was no less active or determined than he. Would Mai, then, be less influential than she?... Would she accept woman's humiliating condition and not care!... But she did not know Arabic... so she had to begin by studying it, in order afterward to add her arrow to the campaign to raise up the Eastern woman and set her free.

And indeed, Mai bent night and day over the diligent study of Arabic. The first thing she read was Bahithat al-Badiya's "Nisa'iyyat," which left upon her the profound impression that led her to make contact with its author and to write a series of studies on her and on her book, which she later gathered together in "Bahithat al-Badiya."

Mai cut her path swiftly, and her articles and lectures set up a deep reverberation in the souls of women and men alike, awakening in them the human sense that had been drugged under the influence of surrender to the law of least effort. Woman came to be understood as a fundamental element of society, whose progress depends on the raising of her level. "One must begin with the education of woman, because she is the more ignorant. She must be reformed quickly, so that the reform of man may be made easier. The emancipation of woman must be undertaken, lest those nourished on her milk be slaves. And does a slave woman raise anything but slaves?... The film of superstitions and illusions must be drawn away from her eyes, so that whoever looks upon her — husband, brother, or son — may perceive that the meaning of life is great."

And as woman develops, in Mai's view, she must in no circumstance lose any of her femininity; on the contrary, she must nourish that femininity and give it ever clearer form: as a girl, she should receive learning in proportion to the home she will one day manage; as a wife, she should be a support to her husband, whom "she will have chosen with her full consent, not as the neighbors and acquaintances wished for her"; as a mother, she should watch over the rearing of her sons and the building of their characters; and as a citizen, she should perform her duties as well as they can be performed, so as to enjoy in consequence the rights that will set her on the level of her Western sister."

She wanted woman to be, first and foremost, a female growing great of heart and abundant in tenderness. "Man's heart has hardened a little — or a great deal — in the economic war he has never ceased to wage in the arenas of life. A certain dryness and tension have overtaken some of his feelings, requirements of competition and struggle. Yet the heart is still woman's kingdom, and in that narrow, spacious kingdom strength and delicacy, melancholy and serenity gather together; contemplation mingles with dreams, and despair with hope. When nothing speaks from man but the voice of greed, menace, and boasting, you women hear in woman's voice a moan, as though it were the remnant of a sigh or the continuation of a weeping; and when he glories in reaching the summit of dominion and attaining far-off ends, you see woman bent over her heart, because something remains asleep within it."

And Mai goes farther still: she assails her friend Plato for his disdain of woman; and at the end of her life — having witnessed the tragedies of the two last wars and the horrors they brought — she proposes that women take over the reins of governments, to achieve a creative and lasting peace, after man's leadership had led to rancors and wars.

The message of woman, which Mai carried all her life with steadfastness, pride, and sincerity, had the farthest and deepest of effects... for she tore it from her rebellious spirit, a pulsing, life-giving piece of her own flesh; and so her voice came as the sweetest and strongest of the voices raised in the sky of this East for the emancipation of the Arab woman: in it the choking of pain, in it the ardor of revolt, and in it the confidence of certain faith.