The Idealism of Youth

The world today is passing through a grave crisis — the crisis of civilization itself. It is a moral and spiritual crisis before it is a crisis of food and raw materials or a crisis of government. It is the crisis of a limp soul that has lost confidence in itself, and has come to doubt all the spiritual values on which civilization rests. People today, in the whole world and not in Lebanon alone, doubt the value of justice and goodness, the value of morals and religion, the value of the school and the laboratory; and worse than all this, they doubt themselves — the most precious gift God has given: human life. And the good people of the earth are asleep — and not in Lebanon only. Human concepts and their standards have been turned upside down. Justice is degraded, and in its name crimes are committed; virtue is scorned, and in its name vices are committed; tyranny is magnified, bodily strength is sanctified, commercial monopoly is counted genius and opportunism intelligence. As for justice — true justice, which is one of the attributes of God — as for meekness, as for goodness, as for piety, as for modesty of mind — all these are marks of weakness and folly, and whoever holds to them is a simple-minded beggar! And since when have nations stood upon delusions and been built upon myths?

We are in a world torn between an old world and a new; it is perplexed, anxious, divided — its feeling pulls it one way and its mind pulls it another. And the strange thing about it is that it accepts this division: you see people living with two minds and two hearts and in two worlds, and nothing disturbs them; then they imagine they have reconciled two incompatibles, when in fact they have come out with a civilization deformed of face and without color — neither Western in its spirit nor Eastern in its appearance.

And we look forward to a generation marked with its own distinctive stamp — a generation of people who have found their personality; and in our Lebanese Eastern heritage, and in the beneficent human civilization in whose train we travel, there is spiritual nourishment enough to guarantee the creation of this new Arab personality.

And in this world the buried forces of repression and deprivation are at work, and the people have become prey to surging, dangerous feelings; you find grumbling on every tongue and every face. And it is neither fair, nor possible, to forbid people to grumble so long as on one side of society there is arrogant wealth and on the other grumbling poverty! This growing, accumulating discontent is among the gravest dangers to the life of the nation, for it not only fills the hearts of the poor

and the criminal with rancor and hatred, but it stirs every citizen who has a heart and a conscience, however much he may enjoy an easy life. And you will find a corrupt economic order — and in the corruption of the economic order lies the germ of every crime. We detest crime whatever its motives, and we believe that to cross life in a beautiful skiff, however long the voyage, is better than to cross it in an ironclad, even if we reached the goal in moments. Yet the voyage of the gentle skiff will remain a beloved thing only if storms and hurricanes pass it by. Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, one of the companions of the Arab Prophet, said, picturing a society from which social justice had departed: "I wonder at the man who finds no food in his house — how does he not go out against the people with drawn sword?" We hate swords; and for all my admiration for Abu Dharr, I wish for something other than what he wished — namely, that among us there be neither hunger nor hungry men.

And our society suffers from remnants of a bedouin spirit lying deep in men's souls: in it the citizen's loyalty is divided between his tribe, his temple, and his priest on the one side, and his homeland and his nation on the other. And no nation arises unless in the depths of every man's soul there is loyalty to his homeland. And what is loyalty? Loyalty is love, devotion, and self-sacrifice. And what is the homeland? The homeland is a spiritual entity: it is not the mountains and valleys and plains and springs, nor is it a mixture of people living side by side yet repelling one another. The homeland is a spiritual mingling among groups of people bound in mutual love, who hold sacred a patch of earth and work together for life.

And worse than all this: the world of today grasps nothing of the essence of religion, and so it has set religiosity in the place of religion, and has substituted for deep spiritual experience a husk of rites and observances. We boast that our lands were the birthplace of revelation, and that we are spiritual. I do not see this spirituality, nor do I know what they mean by it. Is it the burning of incense? Or the recitation of charms? Or the addressing of jinn? Or is it a turning away from the world and its delights? Or is it the killing of the body and the starving of the mind? And when society's belly and its mind go hungry, it becomes a docile mount for every overweening tyrant. As I understand religion, it is life, and love, and fair dealing; it is a flight from the dark hollows to fragrant skies; and it is one of the marks of a full life brimming with plenty and happiness.

And shall I describe to you the psychology of the Arab and his attitude toward law and order? And shall I take you into the sick Arab house, into which light enters only sparingly? No — for I know that you know much about our diseases. But this present world in which we live is a world swollen with immense possibilities, rich in raw human material, and we are called today to carry out the mission of spiritual resurrection; and we must thank God, who casts you into a crumbling society so that your gifts may show themselves.

I want us to remind the young that spiritual crises smelt nations through and through, and then create

them anew, sound and whole. In crises the prophets appeared; in crises the prayers and the psalms were written; in crises were born the treasures of the heritage that make life beautiful. So let the crisis not shake you, and let the sight of evil not dismay you. Victory — the greatest victory in life — is the victory over despair; it is the triumph over defeatism. And the victors in the battle of life, the immortal idealists, are those whose faith conquered and whose principles prevailed.

And I want you, young people, finally, to keep your ideals in a world that has abandoned its ideals, and to make conviction and moral firmness your substance.