Said Akl Introduces Dr. Salwa Nassar

At her lecture before the Cénacle Libanais, "Before the Atom and After It"

Salwa Nassar, for the first time at our Cénacle! She is a sweet leaf among all the leaves of the year; it is an occasion of joy, and I think I hear the heart of the Cénacle Libanais beating.

And she is, added to the good deeds of the founder, Mr. Michel Asmar, yet another deed in the field of the pledge he took upon himself from the day he began to see to it that our necklace, as it comes, should not lack a single one of the pearls of which Lebanon boasts.

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To speak to you of Salwa Nassar? It is rather to stretch your hand toward a bouquet of roses: it perfumes the place, and it perfumes your hand.

The name of Salwa Nassar is a glory — a glory for us in the circles of science in America and in Europe. More than one atomic scientist there has boasted of having published a study jointly with Salwa; more than one is there whose name we have read after hers on a scientific paper; more than one, of the rank of Oppenheimer, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in America, has worked for months with his hands beside her hands in the same laboratory or over the same equation.

All that, in the language of pride and the lifted head, is something not granted to many nations.

The mere fact that we brought forth this woman of science has contributed to our right to independence, to social advancement, and to the ambition of gazing toward great things.

Salwa Nassar was — not in Lebanon alone but in the whole East — the first woman who aspired to practice the most difficult of sciences: the science that concerns the politics of the present, because today it takes the place of heroism and the marching of armies, and because tomorrow it will supply man with cheap power until prosperity becomes within everyone's reach. It is the science on whose good or evil use depends the survival of the globe or its extinction.

Do you suppose that by taking up this kind of lofty activity the Lebanese scientist meant to say to the colonizer: what role is left for you in a country whose concerns have become the equal of your own? Or was she intent on displaying the thirst of the Eastern mind in its rapture for the latest knowledge — making things into things, dismantling matter, recomposing it anew, drawing level with Him who willed it in His image and likeness?

In Lebanon, no man before her looked toward this kind of attainment; and in the whole East she is still the only woman in it.

Émile Bréhier says in his 'History of Philosophy,' quoting the geographer Strabo, that the first atomist on earth was from Sidon: Mochus, who lived in the twelfth century B.C., and from whom Democritus, by way of Leucippus, took what came to be known as the atomic theory.

How much meaning that fact takes on today, now that this Lebanese woman has been the first Eastern woman to complete Mochus, after his theory has become scientific fact and palpable, living reality.

Work in modern physics demands a playing with numbers matched by wariness, and rarely is woman granted the gift of mathematics; yet Salwa Nassar took up this science as if she went to widen the bounds of what is possible for women.

How much of a victory for woman over man there was in her work, in our galling present circumstances — over the man who has withheld her rights from her while himself falling short toward her.

Nor was Salwa Nassar content with that; she pressed forward, and chose for herself, as her specialty among the branches of this science, the branch that remains the most obscure of all its aspects: cosmic rays.

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How far has she gone along her road?

Let us leave the answer to her, and to her students who will complete her work tomorrow. All we know is that this Lebanese woman — modest yet proud, loving yet severe with herself, withdrawn yet open toward the truth — has passed through a thousand crises; the circles of science in America and Europe drew her back twice and three times, but the land that brought her forth prevailed in the end and returned her to itself, despite the poverty of means here, and despite being forced to work alone.

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And you ask me: what is Salwa Nassar's dream?

It has not been given me to enter into that simple, rich heart, nor to divulge the thing which would be weakened by being anything less than fulfillment.

All I have for you is that Salwa Nassar's dream is great, and that the two words 'Lebanon' and 'the good' are engraved at its core.

Our love for Salwa Nassar is part of piety in Lebanon, and part of our road to a great destiny.