Q — I know that you attended the ceremony of the distribution of diplomas at the Syrian University and saw the abundant number of young ladies who passed in the various branches of specialization. Do you support the Syrian girl in her pursuit of higher education?

A — You will have learned from my previous answers that I find a strong bond between a person's culture and his national feeling; the more his culture increases, the more this feeling grows and matures. It is natural, then, that I should wish to see higher culture spread among all citizens, women and men.

Q — The number of young ladies holding higher degrees is increasing rapidly. Do you encourage their entry into state posts, considering competence alone?

A — The mistaken curricula of instruction laid down by the colonizer aimed at creating an army of functionaries — that is to say, the student's whole purpose in studying was to obtain the diploma, and his whole purpose in the diploma was to obtain a post... I personally am against the policy of officeholding, and I wish we had to search for the employee with difficulty and could not find him; but it is regrettable that most of our young men now aspire to nothing but the post... and perhaps that is the case with some cultured young ladies as well... I prefer, for man and woman alike, work in the free professions, and I believe that

woman's broad field is the social field: it is her vital sphere, in which, with her gentleness and her femininity, she can render the finest and most fruitful services.

Q — What is your advice to the working Arab woman?

A — My first advice is that she perform her fundamental mission: that she equip herself with the knowledge and experience that raise her level and broaden her personality, and that she devote her care to bringing up the generation of the future as it ought to be brought up: strong, sound, and conscious of its national duties. My second advice, to her and to every Arab woman, is that she take from modern civilization all its merits, and that she not corrupt her personality in the name of civilization!...

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Talk of the Heart: From the Depths
Speak to me of him, my heart, for all my breast is filled, toward him, with the awakening of a longing — and what a longing!
Repeat in my ear the tale of my life with him, O heart... Four years!... Their days like the breaking of light upon the summits of Sannine, and each of their nights held the ululation of a virgin wedding, in which happiness had a pasture — and what a pasture!
And in the flood of our love, we thought this bliss of ours a companion for life, that it would fill our youth as a gentle lifetime and lean upon the staff of our old age.. But we were living in a deceiving mirage.
And in the black hour... the reckless axe fell upon our infant love, tearing its heart from between its ribs.. Woe to it! Woe to it for what it did!! Who dares to look?! Who dares to listen?!... And how did I wake — I tremble at the horror of the calamity, in the stupor of the idiot who heeds nothing!!
•
Have you heard, my heart, the tale of the mighty pine at the Overlook of Choueir — how the thunderbolt split it, on a raging night: one half burned and withered down below, and the other half remained, in its silent loftiness, bleeding the blood of its dead twin?? As for its wailing and its lament, the storm wrapped them in the cloak of its own howling and clamor and carried them far... far from the hearing of the other pines on the overlook!!
This is my tale — the summary of my four years with him... Yes, I have lived on after him, but I have lived as a second woman, her heart wrapped in ice, searching in vain, in her desolate exile, for the mate who went away and did not return!
... All my hope now, my heart, is two little fledglings in the innocence of their childhood, clinging to me, warming my cold nights and making life dear to me with their sweet prattle!
... When deep sleep closes their eyelids, in the night, I kneel beside their beds and search their two faces, with insistent longing, for the features of a beloved who is gone, and I call back to my mind the memories of four years.. they are the summit of my happiness, and the summit of my love!
Aphrodite
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