Culture in a nation is measured by the degree of national consciousness and social sense in its citizens. Have we, then, any right to claim culture? And may we consider everyone who holds a degree in the higher sciences to be cultured?

Let us take, for example, a woman from among the holders of higher degrees; let us set aside talk of the sciences in which she specialized, and let us discuss with her our public concerns, whether national or social. Then let us judge whether she is cultured, or merely educated — for instruction contents itself with amassing scat-tered bits of knowledge, discordant or harmonious, weighing down the mind without polishing the spirit; whereas culture aims at the higher values of life, and makes of a woman a lady who knows her true self and seeks her right by way of duty.

Our ignorance of the needs of our society and the causes of our nation deprives us of the very purpose of our knowledge. And I am certain that learning which brings no benefit is like ignorance which does no harm.

What is woman's share of culture in our country?

The well-informed observer has the right to judge that the majority of our educated women are without culture, or are half-cultured.

You see a university girl proud of the degrees she has won in the sciences, and you believe you stand before a woman of the kind you hope for for your country. But if you talk with her, the painful truth is quickly laid bare: she is ignorant of everything that concerns the affairs of her country, material or moral.

She knows by heart, for instance, the history of Europe; hardly an event of its ancient or modern

history escapes her; and she knows more of the social and national developments in the life of England and France across ten centuries than she knows of the national or social developments that have taken place in her own country within a single year. She is educated with an alien learning, of no use to herself, her people, or her country.

Woman, of course, is not alone in this deformed culture; man shares her ignorance in it. Yet it may be said that the number of cultured men in our country exceeds the number of cultured women, because social consciousness has penetrated men's circles over a wider range — and that is because woman among us was reared in a spirit of dependence in all that concerns her private and public affairs. The responsibility for this falls upon corrupt, artificial social conditions, left behind by the ages of decadence that passed over us: they corrupted the life of our society, carried its dissolution and fragmentation to extremes, and worked upon the souls of its sons, so that they grew up dependent and mutually repellent in their social life, unconcerned with their national destiny.

But time has turned its cycle, and it has become our duty to learn from the nations that grasped their national causes and turned in a sound direction toward social, literary, and historical studies.

In our country there is a social awakening, and woman in our homeland enjoys no small measure of relative freedom, if it be measured against the condition of woman in our Arab world. The doors of learning stand open to her. She has outdone the Western woman in many of the trivial, outward aspects of life; the husks of the West dazzled her, and she rushed after them, believing them