"The Woman's Voice" Asks You...

A friend of mine came to visit — a woman who is, by the measure of what culture means among the majority of our girls, of middling culture. She sat down at a table on which lay a few magazines, among them "The Woman's Voice." She took it up and turned over several of its pages, then paused a little at the table of contents; and nothing caught her fancy but the title "A Love Letter." She looked at me with eyes brimming with pleasure, her smile betraying her delight at having found such a subject, and she read the letter in silence; then she raised her voice, repeating certain sentences in which these words recur: my beloved, my heart's blood, O light of my eyes... and the rest of what abounds in love's communings. Would that she had stopped at that; but she insisted on taking the magazine with her, promising to return it in two days.

This reader is married, and a mother. What, then, is the position of the many at her level — above all the unmarried among them, whose culture has not reached the point that would enable them to steer their emotions as reason requires?!

Love is among the loftiest of human emotions, if we do not say it is the loftiest of them. It is a fact there is no way to deny, however hard certain traditions have labored to smother it. And yet, in spite of that, it remains in our East a crime that draws shame — and at times woe — upon whoever proclaims it openly. I am certain that ninety percent of our girls read love letters in books of every kind, copy them out, and learn them by heart in secret, for fear of "shame," or in dread of the family's anger and wrath.

Therefore I do not think there is any good in our beginning by publishing and encouraging what is still frowned upon; rather, the good of our society, and its true service, lies in beginning by educating it in this field — a culture that will make it look at truths as they are in reality, not as it has inherited them from its Bedouin traditions.

I do not deny the benefit that comes of the cultivated few reading the love letters of the great writers and poets; in that there is a literary pleasure, and an acquaintance with the hearts of the great, which no fair-minded person would deny. But if, in publishing love letters, we aim at teaching readers — young men and girls — the ways of love and the means of address within it, then we are gravely mistaken and affected. For love is a personal, intimate emotion; of all emotions it clings closest to its owner, and stands furthest from any need of affectation in its showing. What one lover feels, no other lover can feel, and no one is more able than the lover himself to express what is in his own soul. Each loves in his own way, and each writes in his own language; and perhaps the words "Good morning, little bird," exchanged between two sweethearts, are more expressive than Qays's verse epistles to his Layla, or "Alfred de Musset's" to his beloved.

I wish to conclude from all this that if there is any justification for publishing "love letters," then the social and educational duty requires that these letters be set within a frame of elevated guidance, so that they may lift up the hearts of our young men and young women and guard them from the stumblings of raw, disordered emotions.

Kafia Baroudi
Tripoli, July 6, 1949

Dear reader,

Miss "Kafia Baroudi" of Tripoli has commented on "A Love Letter" alone, out of all the magazine's sections on which we sounded out our women readers. In her comment on this letter Miss Baroudi says things true and beautiful, which show a sound social understanding and a genuine feeling for sentiment.

She says, among other things: "Love is among the loftiest of human emotions." And yet, alongside this, we see her going along, to a certain point, with the Eastern society that still counts love a crime that draws shame.

And she holds... together with her view that love is among the loftiest of human emotions, that "there is no good in our beginning by publishing and encouraging what is still frowned upon."

And though she affirms the benefit of the cultivated few reading the love letters of the great writers and poets, for the literary pleasure in it and the acquaintance with the hearts of the great... she fears that behind it may lie the teaching of readers — young men and girls — the ways of love and the means of address.

We reassure Miss Baroudi, and declare to her that the publication of "love letters" in "The Woman's Voice" will never aim at teaching girls the means of address and communing...

"A Love Letter" is, before all else, a spiritual window through which we look out upon the hearts of great men and great women, and in which we become acquainted with the deep longings that stir in their depths.

And the time has come, in this long, broad East of ours, to call shame shame and crime crime... As for our saying that love — though it be among the loftiest of human emotions, if not the loftiest — is still, in our East, a crime: that saying means we are still poor, sick people.

The Editors