Strip Your Souls Bare!

The last war laid down its burdens, and people rejoiced and took heart. The heedless peoples awoke from their slumber, striving to rise, to create strength out of weakness and ease out of hardship.

They marched forward with enlightened minds and free thoughts, tearing down the barriers that vile fanaticism had erected on the foundation of ignorance, and taking up the means of strength so as to attain the best that life can supply of movement and activity.

Across the East there appeared a movement of renewal, violent in its effect, which shook the East from one end to the other. And behold, the Eastern lands began to enjoy something of life, after having grown used to illusions, stagnation, and torpor.

This revolt against oppression and despotism was not the child of the Great War; it had lain dormant in souls for a long time, nourished by cries for help rising from the depths of thinkers and reformers, to spread the spirit of work and wakefulness.

The Easterners had learned the consequences of blind submission to the fates, and they felt an intense thirst for a free life and for shattering the shackles from their necks. Their sufferings gathered them together, and they rose with this single feeling, resisting everyone who tramples their right to a free life and screens from them its radiant light.

Nor is it strange that this work and its effect should flood the new life of the East. For the laws of life decree change and alteration, and there is survival only for the fittest.

God has ordained that the East should rise from its slumber, shake off the dust of ignorance and torpor, and look at the West's march along the road of progress. And here two tendencies awoke within it, quarreling with each other: the tendency of the old and the tendency of the new. That is why we see it now standing in a perilous position, between one party fanatically devoted to the old, be it good or bad, clinging to its morals and customs, and another party railing against the past and inclined to everything new.

And it is stupidity for the East to stand against modern civilization, turning its gaze away from seeing the benefits and blessings there are in the new!

It is for us, then, to purify ourselves of the illusions of ignorance, stretch out our hands to shake hands with the higher life, and listen to the voices of true progress and the perfection we seek.

Huda Tawfiq Tali – Deir al-Qamar