May and Politics

One of the most difficult things for the researcher into May's life and her outlook on life is to find, in what has been published about her up to now, much that would cast light on her singular life, or a glimmer upon her ideas through which he might penetrate to the essence of her beliefs and to the core of her social thinking. We cannot, in this brief sketch, trace the details of this thinking, nor go deep into its inward recesses and outward paths, nor see its effect upon her age, for that would demand much research such as we are not able to undertake now. But there is one important matter in May's life and in her thinking which we must broach, and to which we must draw attention, for its importance to the history of our modern renaissance even more than for its importance in itself. The age in which May wrote, and the age which she helped to direct, was an age in which the country was in labor with a new outlook on life — whether in society, in national consciousness, or in politics. These three matters are interlaced with one another; no one of them can be separated from its two sisters or lag behind them, and when that happens the three fall into conflict and actual progress halts until hands are joined anew. This struggle between the two factors of national consciousness and politics and the factor of society was, in May's age, a fierce struggle, and it remains so to a certain degree.

For the progressive conception of politics, and the state of the world of nations, demanded of us that we march forward into the arena of struggle with the weapons of the strong nations. But alas, our social life was a life of backwardness and regression, drawing its inspiration and its direction from the worn-out traditions of the East and from its firm-set fetters.

And if the situation in our country was a struggle between the old and the new, the West had already passed beyond this stage and stood before a graver problem — I mean the problem of the disparity between the classes and the question of mastery. Why should some individuals enjoy the best of life while others suffer, without any cause? And who should take the helm to wipe out this disparity?

Whoever knows May knows that she lived between East and West; that is, she wanted for this East the open, unbound mentality of the West — that penetrating mentality which does not accept merely for the sake of accepting nor reject merely for the sake of rejecting, but which searches, scrutinizes, understands, and judges. Yet she did not wish the East to lose its soul, to lose that tenderness which fills its frame and that peace which reigns in the hearts of its sons. In her heart there was a new flame, a flame kindled in her by the sight of her homeland trying to slip free of the fetters of servitude — the servitude of the mind and the servitude of ideas. She lived as though she did not know where, and looked about her with a pressing desire within her to know: where is she? and who is she? Within her was the longing of the Easterner who would have the whole world for his homeland, and the pride of the Westerner in his glorying in his homeland and his nationality. And she was aware that in the depths of her soul there was a yearning to belong to her homeland, to take pride in it, and to draw from this belonging and this pride a calm such as certainty adds to the hearts of believers. She knew that philosophy and art and science have no homeland, but she was aware that the artist and the philosopher and the man of science have a homeland; and she wanted her homeland to be hers, and herself to be its. For this reason she saw it as her duty to ward off from this homeland the calamities of colonialism, and that this homeland should carry the mentality of strength and the mentality of victory.

And the Western East in May made her question this cruelty of differentiation: she felt for the poor and felt for the working people, and she saw that there is a disparity between the classes that stirs grief in the soul and tears in the eye; she grasped with her heart this problem which the West grasps with its mind. Can people, one wonders, ever be equal? And what is this equality? And where is it? To these questions May devoted a book unique of its kind in the Arabic language — the first of its kind, if not of its subject — in which she examined the social classes and how they arise, then studied each class separately: aristocracy, servitude and slavery, then democracy; and then she took up the solutions to this new problem, examining the philosophers' attempts to conceive ideal cities, like Thomas More and Campanella and Wells, and studied the latest of these attempts in the theory of Marx and its revolutionary methods, and what this last may lead to in various doctrines, such as anarchism and nihilism — all of which, in her view, constitute problems still more complicated and more constricting, from which no realization of equality is to be hoped.

May believes that the road to establishing equality is not an easy one, and considers it beset with abundant difficulties; so she concludes by saying that it is necessary to establish a kind of nationalization, close to what exists in England today, since the problem of equality cannot be solved by our human nature. She therefore asks that governments open public restaurants and free lodging-houses to be frequented by the poor and the needy; that begging be forbidden; that elementary education be made compulsory and obligatory; that public offices be established in which qualifications are examined; that the services of physicians, pharmacies, hospitals, and nursing be free for all; that governments undertake the payment of lawyers' fees; and that in the prisons the prisoners be separated according to their stations and their morals. By such a system the problem can, to a certain degree, be solved.

In this glimpse we look out upon some of May's political thinking, and we see in it her progressive direction and this inclination to break free from national unconsciousness into pure consciousness.