and that every emigrant is a stranger. A stranger, living on the margin of people's lives in the homelands of other people. A stranger, bound to his first homeland by a thousand and one roots. A stranger, distracting himself now with work, now with gather-ing money, now with raising children; and no sooner do they grow up — children of the soil of the new homeland — than his estrangement deepens, and he feels more than at any other time that he is a stranger.

Life has taught me that all the philosophies — those that search for a Creator who floods existence with an outpouring of blessings, and for man's relation to this Creator and then to this existence, and for the roads that lead up to the summit of human perfection — life has taught me that the cream of all the philosophies is contained in noble sayings such as these:

"O man, love God with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

"All creatures are God's dependents, and the dearest of them to Him is the most useful to His dependents."

And life has taught me that religion is the best restrainer and the best deterrent. In my life I have fled only from those from whose hearts the fear of God has fled.

*

The nights have taught me that the hurt which people's tongues inflict upon people is killed only by silence! I do not mean the stillness of the tongue between the jaws; what I mean by it is the stillness of the mind from remembering the hurt. The greatest of men and women are those who erase from their memories every trace of the aggression of backbiters, of haters, and of the suspicious-minded; for there is no pleasure to be measured against the pleasures of forgiveness — the true, the complete. In it is rest from the boilings of anger, then of rancor, then of the desire to return the injury; and in it is deliverance from an ugliness that traces itself upon the most radiant of faces and the most perfect in form, the hour the mind sets about magnifying wrongs, and the hour the door opens to the spirit of evil and it drives the lights of love from the heart. Then the muscles of the face con-tract, the nose grows old, the brow wrinkles, the light dies in the eye, the smile of contentment flees from the mouth, and the waves of life dry up in the hair. If the existentialists, those who run after pleasure in

life, were discerning, they would know that there is no pleasure and no life without beauty, and no beauty without love, and no love without forgiveness — if these toilers after happiness were discerning, they would summon mankind to the creed of "Forgivenism."

Those who have influenced me in my life are those who sowed before me, among the thorns, the seeds of love. They are the ones who told me that reproach is not always a soap for hearts, and that the sage of his generation was the author of this verse:

If in every matter you keep reproaching your friend, you will never meet the one you need not reproach!

*

Every one of life's days has taught me that woman — in every family quarrel — is the wronged one: as mother, and sister, and wife, and daughter; and that she is like a vase of crystal — whether it falls upon the stone or the stone falls upon it, the result is one in either case; and that the halls of justice lift no injustice from a woman; and that complaint to people and airing one's pain in the salons carry off self-respect and dignity and defile the heart, the holy of holies! And I am certain that the two following verses were composed for women above all other people:

Complain not, to blamer or excuser, of either of your states, in ease or in adversity; for the pity of the condolers is a bitterness in the heart, like the gloating of enemies.

*

O my reader, wherever you may be — a quarter of a century ago I read a testament left to the generations by the master of prose writers, Abdullah ibn al-Muqaffa', in which he set down the qualities of a perfect man, saying at its end: "Hold fast to these morals if you can — and you will not be able wholly — but taking a little is better than leaving the whole."

Since that day I have tried to resemble, in some measure, that perfect one who "does not complain, and does not crave, and does not chafe and does not fret, and does not keep for himself, apart from his brothers, anything of his resource and his effort and his strength."

I confess, truthfully, that I have tried and still try, and striven and still strive, to overtake that hero victorious over his own self — and I have not yet succeeded altogether!