What a complete lady she was, uniting beauty of body and of soul with beauty of letters and of eloquence — "how sweet she is!" That is what ran through my mind when I first saw her and heard her, at a gathering of the "Shams al-Birr" society in the month of May 1912, mounting the platform and delivering her radiant address.
She stood there a debater sure of herself, in a contest whose subject was: "Which are the more effective in the advancement of human society — the sons of wealth or the sons of poverty?" She took the side of the poor, while her opponent, our great man of letters Mr. Amin al-Gharib, argued that the rich are the more effective in advancing the social body.
And although I was of Mr. al-Gharib's opinion, Mrs. Salma was able to shake the pillars of my conviction by her gentleness and her fluency, added to the strength of her argument and the power of her eloquence, and she left me between doubt and certainty.
While I was in that state, and amid the audience's sharp applause, my companion whispered in my ear: "Have you not believed?" I said: "No, and my heart is not at rest." He said: "Will you wager?" I said: "Yes," and we agreed on the bet. Then a prize was put up to be won by one of the two debaters, and for this purpose a jury was formed of Miss Julia Tu'mah and Messrs. Jabr Dumit, Antoun Shuhaybar, Omar Naja, Abd al-Ghani Sunni — "the mektubji of the vilayet" — and Badr Dimashqiyah. The jury, with the exception of Mr. Omar Naja,
agreed unanimously to give the verdict to Mrs. Salma; she won the prize, and I lost the bet.
A few years then passed over all this — years that were harsh upon our dear departed, because of what befell her in them: an unhappy marriage that ended in separation, and what she, like others, faced of the horrors of the First World War. But the soft smiles never left her face, and her literary activity kept rising above all her troubles, heedless of her failing health.
She taught and wrote books and
gave speeches and wrote, and carried the literary societies upon her shoulders — which moved me to marvel at that slender body which lifted such burdens of life as giants would stagger under.
And like others, I admired her still more when, in 1921, we founded — with the learned Sheikh Ibrahim al-Mundhir at our head — the "League of Letters" society; for Mrs. Salma was not merely our fragrant, sweet-scented flower: she
opened her home to this society and to all the men of letters, as though she were not facing the hard problems of life that she did face!
Mrs. Salma's illness worsened during the activity of the women's movement in 1928, at the time when the "Al-Nahda An-Nisaiyah" society in Lebanon was leading that activity under the presidency of Mrs. Labiba Philippe Tabet. But the illness was powerless to weaken her strong nerves, and she was the mainspring of the movement in the ceremonies and exhibitions this society held; and whenever she felt weakness beginning to creep into her nerves, she took refuge in the mountain to recuperate, then returned more active than before.
And shall I forget the ardor she poured out to ensure the flourishing of the society's third exhibition, which it held beginning on April 9, 1928, at the Ottoman College?
No, I am not one to forget that ardor, which did honor to the face of woman and made people believe in her after disbelief.
And now, if I am obliged to content myself with mere allusion in setting forth the merits of Salma Sayegh — out of regard for the brevity stipulated by the splendid magazine The Woman's Voice — then history, of which I am one of the servants, will record for this lady the glorious deeds she performed, during the first half of the present century, above all in the cause of woman's renaissance and her emancipation. God rest her soul.