The Letters of May — Madeleine Arqash

A charming title for a book of two hundred and twenty-four pages by Mrs. Madeleine Arqash, which brings back to the reader's mind the memory of the departed figure of women's letters, May Ziadeh—until, turning some of its pages, he is reminded of the letters of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter Madame de Grignan.

Yet despite the resemblance in form between the two collections,

we observe that they differ entirely in substance. Madame de Sévigné's letters were written to amuse her daughter and divert her with the doings of the court, in her surroundings far from the diversions of Paris. The letters of "May," on the other hand, are a collection of talks, counsels, experiences, and pieces of information which the mother conveys to her married daughter, who lives far away from her in the lands of the Mahjar—and it is this that gives them a genuinely Lebanese color.

And although, in our modern East, we expect the daughter to be broader in learning and in thought than her mother, considering the rapid evolution through which we are passing at the present time, the author saw fit to have these letters issue from a modern mother who pursues study, reading, and writing, keeps pace with modern developments, and presents her views in a tone in which we discern frankness and sincerity.

The book—as it appears—is the fruit of a long effort spent by its author in reading and in gathering information from its various sources, ancient and modern. Quotations, citations, and proverbs abound, drawn from Western and Arabic books by well-known thinkers; and alongside these stand the author's own views and her personal thinking on social subjects such as jealousy, greed, servants, dancing, gambling, fashions, mourning, and spinsters; and on philosophical subjects such as death, hope, reason, fortune, old age, justice, truth, and the secret of existence.

There is a mixture of views, some of them modern to an extreme degree of modernity—such as her counsel of revolt against traditions that serve no purpose, like mourning; her insistence on the necessity of evolution and the avoidance of rigidity, and on amending the civil laws relating to woman and making her equal with man in rights; and her advocacy of progressive reforms touching marriage and instruction in matters of sex.

And there are strange philosophical views, such as the doctrine of transmigration, which holds that souls pass from one body to another, and that people are distributed among the heavenly bodies according to their deserts: the righteous in luminous mansions of great radiance, where they have reached a degree of evolution that brings them near to the gods; the wicked in dark orbs; while others pass through the stages of purification that precede their removal to the higher planets. The final stage in evolution is union with God, after the manner of the Sufis...

There is also astronomical information, and there are psychological views on delicacy of feeling, or what we call the speech of the heart; on the communion of souls at a distance; on the dreams of night and the dreams of waking; and on the usefulness of envy and its harms—of which she says: "Were there no envier and no envied, the world would be struck with stagnation and retreat. The two opposites, good and evil, are brothers who always walk together."

The book contains observations that stir thought, and it contains exhortation to virtue, to moderation, to obedience to God, and to the exaltation of reason, since it is the greatest power in existence. Yet it is not, for all that, free of a certain deference to some old beliefs—for instance, in the matter of the fulfillment of vows—while some of its many subjects have not been studied sufficiently; the writer has contented herself, in their regard, with sweeping generalizations or with the repetition of familiar sayings whose truth has not been established.

Nevertheless, it deserves attention for what it shows us of its author's energy and ambition, and of her sincere desire to inquire and to acquire knowledge, and then to spread it among the daughters of her sex.