Julia's Marriage...

It was night, and the company, in a corner of the house of Qustantin Thabit, was listening to one of those present as he explained the program of an oratorical gathering to be held the next day, at which donations would be collected for the benefit of a project to build a sanatorium for those stricken with tuberculosis. Among the company was a lady who listened to the speaker with her whole being, light streaming from her blue eyes — and this lady was none other than Julia Tu'mah. The speaker had scarcely finished before the effect of his words had taken hold of every tremor of Julia's spirit, and she sprang up to tell those present the story of a lady she had come to know in Broummana, who was stricken with this malignant disease. Her children had brought her from Beirut, placed her in a house they rented for her, and left her there alone to suffer the pains of the body and of solitude; they visited her only rarely, fearing for themselves the contagion of the disease that gnawed at her lungs without respite or mercy. Julia heard of this lady, and her humanity and nobility of soul would allow nothing less than visiting her at every opportunity, lightening her loneliness and her pains, and laboring to raise her spirits and her hope in life. Julia told those present the story of this lady with all the eloquence she possessed, for she lived what she said, and pictured the pain she felt at the side of this wretched patient. Her words sank deep into their hearts; they felt what she felt and were moved as she was moved, and those present asked her to tell this story before the honored assembly on the day of the gathering. She refused flatly, for she stood in awe of Beirut, and of its society above all; it was not then the custom of the ladies of Lebanon to attend oratorical gatherings — how then should she stand among them as a speaker!

The next day, during the oratorical gathering, Miss Thabit whispered in the ear of the master of ceremonies that he should present Julia Tu'mah to the audience, that she might tell them what she had described so well the night before. He did so, and faced with the accomplished fact, Julia rose and walked forward as though a hidden power were driving her toward the platform, which she mounted for the first time in her life. She stood before the assembly, drew her strength from its silence, and delivered a moving, splendid address in which the loftiness of her feelings and the nobility of her thoughts shone forth. She excelled in describing the disease and its pains and the misery of the stricken, until she held the feeling and the emotion of all present. She spoke with a strange fervor, and with a sincerity that entered the depths of the soul, shaking it and impelling it toward goodness and charity. Scarcely had she finished her story when the hands of those present blazed with applause, and they opened their pockets to the project, giving to it with a generosity the like of which had never been seen before. But Julia won not only their admiration and their applause; she won something more precious — she won a heart that beat hard for her and yearned toward her, and this heart was none other than the heart of Badr Dimashqiyah, who had listened to her from among the audience.

Fate would have it that Badr and Julia should meet a second time, on the day when a runaway horse, ridden by Ali Salam, son of Salim Salam, struck her and threw her to the ground. Badr accompanied Salim Salam to the hospital, where the latter went to apologize to the lady for his son's deed, and so he came to know at close hand this lady, radiant with nobility and gentleness.

This incident took place in 1913, and it was the turning point in Julia's life, for she married Badr Dimashqiyah, to form the true Lebanese home. And in her marriage she was a rebel, an insurgent.

Yes, a rebel — for she perceived with her keen insight that the ideal family, uniting man and woman, rests upon love, admiration, and mutual respect, and upon the sense of the necessity of handing down its culture and its good customs to its children; and these two principles were missing in the Lebanese family, where the mind opens on the man's side and never dawns on the woman's, owing to the total absence of her personality. This absence stripped her of every will, of every lofty idea, and her weakness and ignorance condemned her to be, in the man's eyes, a truncated creature, bound to a particular conduct whose axis was blind obedience, wariness and caution, and a feeling of guilt toward the man, since she could not rise to the doing of any positive deed. Julia rose up in the face of this crippled state of affairs and revolted against it

with a wrathful revolt — she into whose depths Western thought had penetrated by way of her culture, giving her new impressions of social and even of spiritual life, and making her understand that she was a creature who could begin from herself, toward herself, and so create new customs, conceptions, tastes, and values suited to the pillars of her own personality.

Julia understood that she was responsible for her own life — which means that she was called upon to build it as she herself wished, not as the man wished. And she was mighty and positive in her rebellion. Mighty, because she protested, as a human being, against the condition to which society had brought her to kneel. And positive, because she did not revolt merely for revolt's sake, but handed the daughters of her sex a program of reform in which she drew the fundamental lines of a rightful married life. She dared to say no to the worn-out, familiar conditions. She gave up everything; indeed, matters had dragged on longer than they should, and the time had come when woman must rise and march in the caravan of civilization. And she said yes, because from her very first move she preserved the moral values and made them the fundamental rule of the course she followed all her life; hence her refusal of final negation.

Julia demolished only in order to build, with her husband, a revolution whose effect reached far into the social order; it overturned conditions nearly a century old, and the two of them lit up the darkness of worn-out human dogmas, and contributed to a great degree to every constructive social renaissance, despite all the material and moral difficulties that stood in its way. Julia answered the call among the sons of the country, in word and in deed, to strengthen the bonds of harmony and union among the various creeds and customs; and the two of them made of their house, for the thinkers of that age, the connecting link and the knot of attachment and understanding among the people of the pen, of letters, and of patriotism.

Julia was pained by sectarianism, and by the splitting of the Lebanese into two mutually repellent camps. She kept this pain within herself and set her mind on fighting it, for she knew, with her piercing intuition, that the value of a thing lies in what shows of it, and that a person is called to account only for a deed that has come into existence and become subject to examination and debate. Conscience is quick in its shifts, rich in its currents — beautiful and radiant at times, ugly and feeble at others. But what is its worth if it remains a conscience that never passes beyond its owner to others, and never comes out into the stage of true action so as to bear fruit? Is a man called to account for the mere wish to kill, if he does not kill? And is he rewarded for the mere wish to spread good over humanity, if he does not truly act to accomplish it?

Badr and Julia worked to wipe out sectarianism, and their work began with their own life: each of them respected and hallowed the beliefs of the other, and they gave to Lebanese society children who love both religions and hold sacred the creeds of both religions — because man has never yet, since he was fashioned a man, been able to separate his thinking from his feeling. He would weigh reason above feeling; but feeling refuses to occupy the second place in which the idealist would set it, and insists on running side by side with reason, so as to dye all its decisions with its own dye, by virtue of its partnership in judgment.

The child who grows up in the arms of a Christian mother is bound by his feeling to hallow Christ and the Virgin Mary along with the performance of his spiritual duties. And the child who is reared in a house managed by a Christian mother cannot but love Islam and defend it. Lebanon will never be rid of its internal crises and its sectarian problems until we raise our children to love all sects and all religions, as Julia and Badr did. They drove the first wedge into the edifice of sectarianism in 1913, and they went on fighting it until time folded them away into the darknesses of the other world.

They were two free human beings who affirmed their selves without ceasing, and who answered to the reality of their labors; they chose, and took upon themselves, the gravest and the noblest of tasks, and they marched with their homeland in the caravan of civilization, fighting every current that stormed against its being, whether cultural, political, or sectarian.