How I Discovered Her

Mr. Jirji Niqula Baz has been the champion of the ladies since the days of our mothers, and he remains an authority on every historic occurrence connected with woman — and with man. What follows is his account of how Julia Dimashqiyah began her literary life.

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We were in Dhour el-Choueir, five young men: the physician Nicolas Rbeiz, the journalist Daoud Bjaas, the lawyer Jibrail Nassar, the man of letters Najib Barakat, and the writer of these lines.

We were strolling along the public road, in September 1906, forty-eight years ago.

And I saw, in the quarter of Ain al-Bustani, a young girl reading the magazine al-Muqtataf.

In Beirut and Lebanon, in those days, women readers of that great scientific magazine were rarer than fire.

Of them I knew, at that time, the late Sarah Khairallah, Huda al-Sulaybi Doumit, Liza Thabit al-Khoury, and my mother, Julia Daghir Baz — and a priest of mature years.

So I marveled at the young girl, reading the greatest of our Arabic magazines — indeed one of the greatest magazines, in science and letters, in the world.

That very day I met her at the Choueir fair, and we became acquainted.

I learned that she was a teacher at the Firdaws School in Brummana, summering with the family of the school's head, Mr. Toma Little, his wife Mrs. Little, and their children.

I observed in her a fine aptitude for acquiring and profiting, and a firm desire for the public good.

We would sometimes go walking, those young men and I together, with our Julia conversing with us.

Until some of us almost doubted what our companion displayed of fine feeling toward the wretched, and of deliberate effort to work for the benefit of society.

It chanced once that our friend Mr. Aziz Gharzouzi — later dragoman of the American Embassy — went with us to Ain al-Sarfad.

And the late Julia had two notebooks with her.

I asked her, intruding, what of her writing was in them, and a partridge-red blush rose in her face.

I pressed her to read us something of what she had written, having gathered from her talk that she was a writer.

Our Gharzouzi pressed her along with me, and she was abashed, and recited to us some of her writings.

We urged her on, and encouraged the writer to keep at composition and to furnish the papers with the daughters of her thoughts.

Then her self-respect showed itself, in her saying: I fear people will scorn me if they do not approve what I write, or accuse me that my father writes for me and I sign my name. And I would like to appear great from the very first time.

My estimate of her letters and her gifts proved right. So I charged her with speaking at three literary celebrations, in Beirut, Bhamdoun, and Tripoli, in 1910, and she won the admiration of her hearers.

And our noble departed one began to cut her way in the world of composition, of oratory, and of writing, until she was pointed out with the finger, and every tongue repeated her name.

Let the Women's League and The New Woman suffice as witness to her merit and her letters — and her continuing as an orator for forty years, and a writer for fifty.

God rest her soul.