Awakening

In the flood of materialism — in a day when words like honor, nobility, and their kind have become old-fashioned terms that come in second place, after words like wealth, pomp, amusement, and pleasure — I find myself asking: can we raise a new generation that returns to yesterday's pride and to the high ideals that were ours yesterday, and puts honor of soul, honesty in dealing, and disdain for everything shameful at the head of its program?

And it seems to me the idea is stirring people in East and West alike; it seems to me that those who are pained by this moral collapse are everywhere at work, trying to put an end to it by creating a generation new in its learning and its culture, old in its character and its steadfastness.

One of the finest things one may observe is that schools in the West have begun to give special care to forming the character of the young and awakening the spirit of uprightness and nobility in their souls; some of them have taken to questions by which they enter the depths of a child's soul, to see how much understanding of the meanings of honor and high-mindedness that little soul contains.

Among the most engaging of these studies is what was done by a school containing an army of little ones. It set them the following question, asked for the answer in writing, and appointed a good prize for the best answer. The question ran thus:

If you saw your mother in danger of death, and nothing could cure her but a certain medicine, and you did not have the price of the medicine, and could not obtain the money except by doing a base deed and losing your honor — what would you do...? Would you let your mother die, or commit the baseness and lose your honor to buy the medicine...?

The children set to writing, and the school set to divining their souls through their answers, certain that the boy who places his honor above his mother's life is the man who will place his honor above everything... The paper that published the incident says that some of the children answered: I will buy the medicine for my mother, then flee to a far-off place where no one knows that I lost my honor, and begin a new life...

And some wrote: My mother's life is worth every honor the world can offer me... But the majority preferred honor over the mother's life, for all the intensity of their love for her. As for the noble answer that won the prize, it was this: I will not give up my honor for any creature; and were I to do so now, my mother would notice, and would know even if no one told her, and would die of grief... My mother would prefer death a thousand times over to my buying her life at this dear price — that she should live to see me stripped of my honor.

And now — this word may seem too big for our little ones, and we may say: what will my child understand of this enormous word, and at what age should it be mentioned to him? The truth is that children understand more than we think they do, and they rise and reach higher in the measure that we explain to them, and guide, and suggest, and then hold to account. And I believe that the word honor should accompany the child from his first acquaintance with life, and be repeated in his hearing joined to every honorable or base act he does.

The child who sets upon his little sister and strikes her, for instance, or upon his younger brother and takes his toys, is not doing an honorable deed. The little girl who filches another's share of the sweets and fruit and shows the utmost greed is doing a base, dishonorable deed. The boy who cheats at his lessons, copying from a schoolmate, or lets his parents prepare his lessons for him and claims that he prepared them himself; the boy who does wrong and then pins the wrong on someone else; the boy who will not help a less clever classmate until he has taken his fee, be it only a picture or a small pencil — these and their like are deeds whose baseness, once explained and joined to words of greatness and high-mindedness, will start the little ones distinguishing baseness from nobility and understanding the meaning of rising above and reaching upward.

Honor, moreover, is of several kinds: honor of soul, honor of the family, honor of the flag, honor of the homeland. They are words that carry the most precious things a person can live for, and they deserve, too, much of our attention, that we may be able to engrave them in our children's breasts.

Honor of soul: my motto is to hold myself above everything shameful, in secret before in public; to stand with head high and confess my mistake without twisting or turning, ready to bear the consequences of that mistake, to pay the price so that I learn the lesson and profit by the moral... I am honorable in my dealings; I do not cheat in word or in deed. When I grow up I will eat no bread made by any hand but my own: the youth who eats bread he has not made by the sweat of his brow is a paltry creature who does not deserve life...

The child who understands this and acts on it is the man of tomorrow who will cut his way through life and find the doors of success opening before him; he is the hope of tomorrow, who will lay one clean stone in the foundation of his corrupted world.

Honor of the family: I am one of a group, a part of a whole; my conduct is not my own property but my family's. Whatever I do, if it is noble, its nobility is theirs and their good name's; and if it is shameful, its shame clings to them and to their good name. I am their son, whom they brought forth; what exalts me exalts them, and what abases me abases them. Every step I take toward success, every struggle, every perseverance, every generous deed is theirs; every honor or elevation I attain, every baseness or degradation to which I sink, is theirs; so I will never be the cause of their disgrace... The child who understands this and grows up on it is the man of tomorrow who measures responsibility, the bearer of his family's glory and the raiser of its edifice.

Honor of the flag and of soldiery. The flag and soldiery remind me of an anthem that had the greatest effect on my life as a citizen. We were little girls sitting on the school bench, and one day they taught us an English anthem and then translated it for us so that we would understand its meaning. The anthem said:

In the battle the fight raged hot around the flag, for it had nearly fallen into the hands of the enemy; and the bodies fell around it, each man raising it and then handing it to his comrade before he fell. Suddenly the commander cried: Soldiers, this is your flag — ransom it! And suddenly, too, a boy sprang forward and raised the flag; he carried it to the hill and planted it in its place, far out of the enemy's reach; then he fell, and was carried to the tent. The battle ended, and the commander hurried to the tent that held the boy hero, to thank him. He knelt beside the bed — and a cry shook the whole countryside, and the commander was shouting: My son! My only son! I thought you safe at home! And the boy brought out, with his last breaths: Forgive me, father, for I ran away from my bed. Tell mother to forgive me, for I shall not come back to her. Tell her to be proud of me, for I have ransomed the flag.

That was the anthem; and I remember, after all this time, how our small voices would ring up to the sky every time we reached the ransoming of the flag. And I remember how we understood — how I understood, from that day and at that early age — that there is something worth a man's ransoming with his soul; and I understood that children can understand, if they are made to understand — that is, if we want them to be soldiers for the country.

Honor of the homeland — that dear piece cut from people's very hearts — how the little ones must love it and ransom it! The good name of my homeland is what the foreigner carries back to his own country, in its images clean or dirty, strong or weak, just as I myself draw it before the foreigner by my conduct and my character...

Love of my homeland: the best of lands is the one that bore me. Every leaf of every tree in it is beloved and dear to my soul; every grain of its dust is mine — it is of the remnants of my body from the day the clay was kneaded and its crumbs fell away. Every mountain, every plain, every river of it is the most beautiful of its kind in the world. I am its child: if it is lost, then I am lost, and shamed, and humbled; its pride is my pride, and its stain is my stain.

How many in our homes, I wonder, draw this picture for our children...? How many of our mothers understand that the homeland's honor and good name are a trust placed in her hands and in her child's?

And finally: if people in the West have come to fear this moral collapse — because they know that nations whose morals collapse perish — and so have awakened and set to shoring up morals by every possible means, how much more do we, being as we are, need this awakening; how fitting it would be for those of us who carry pens to join hands with the schools and the mothers, to stand against this current — against these picks that are hacking at the foundation of our edifice. God rest Shawqi, who said:

If a people's edifice is struck
by a weakness of character, it is a weakness in the foundation.