These pioneers!

It is as if society were dense jungles, blind unexplored wastes, deposits piling up upon time;

as if its darkness wrapped a world that surges as the worlds of darkness surge. And so thickly is it veiled that it becomes a wellspring of legend, superstition, fancy, and conjecture — woven endlessly, its material never running dry.

As if there were terrors there beyond the terrors of the deep sea, the ancient forest, the plunging gorge; none draws near them but that rare heroism which plays with death.

As if the human light had gone out, or nearly so, and humanity had turned to stone and ceased to grow, and talents lagged behind, ignorant of themselves — how much more, then, were they unknown to men.

And time seems dead — until there comes one of the outpourings of human heroism, in a human being ordinary like all others, at the edge of the unknown wastes; differing, however, in this: that people see the social forest as a fixed thing that does not change, a holy of holies whose sanctity may not be touched, while heroism faces it with a question on its lips: "These jungles — what are they? These unknown wastes — what is their nature? These worlds surging in the darkness — with what do they surge? These terrors — whence comes it that they are terrors?"

Then it differs from all other people in that the question is not content with itself. It wants the answer. And the will to the answer takes body in daring. Without waiting, daring advances to strike the first blow at the dense jungles, at the blind wastes, at the deposits heaped and layered upon time — and opens a chink for the ray of light.

And no sooner is a chink opened for the ray than the ray itself takes over the widening of its own passages; for it is of the nature of dawn that its light grows the moment it breaks — it does not tarry.

And the dead thing comes back alive and beating.

Blessed, then, be the pioneers! Long indeed does humanity linger, perplexed, its generations passing one after another in the wariness of dread before the closed worlds and the solid stagnation. Then, in a moment of fullness, deaf rock splits open upon a

bursting surge of heroism; and there is a spring that flows and does not run dry.

And people see the spring flowing — flowing without running dry — and it never crosses their minds that here there was once closed, deaf rock. How, then, did the spring flow? But those who witnessed the pioneer knew the secret of the deaf rock's splitting open upon the spring.

They witnessed people's panic lest the spring turn into a flood that would drown them, so that they refused to drink of it and pelted it with stones.

They witnessed people's terror of the light, because they had grown used to darkness.

They witnessed the reviling of this infidel who had violated the sanctity of the closed forest.

And they witnessed, likewise, the pioneer's steadfastness, and the going on to finish the task.

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I was not — personally — among the witnesses of this pioneer's — Julia Tu'mah Dimashqiyah's — storming of the jungles of our society, and her opening of a chink for the light. But I was there when the light had already flooded in, and the spring flowed — never to run dry. I was there while remnants of the thick jungles still stood, and the task of the heroic struggle was not yet done.

I entered this arena when society had agreed to apportion the women's awakening among three of our pioneers: Salwa Salama for delicacy of poetry, Labiba Hashim for beauty of the pen, and Julia Tu'mah for excellence of delivery. For Julia — as I know — made her first leap by way of the platform, and people heard, for the first time, a woman speaker calling from a platform for social reform, and first of all for the reform of woman's condition by way of her education.

We may not be able today — when the universities pour out over the Arab world wave upon wave of women of high culture — to appreciate that call. To appreciate it and weigh it justly we must go back fifty years, and picture the women's quarters with their heavy curtains, the windows with their thick lattices, and the "possession of the right hand" which then determined man's relation to woman. We must picture all this to grasp what heroism of heart a young girl in the first bloom of youth had to possess in order to mount a platform, issue a call, and argue a case on the subject of woman, in a city like Sidon, without trembling, without her voice shaking or straying. And this was but the first summons announcing a long mission which Julia carried; nor did she rest until the torch had been taken from her hands by one generation after another of the bearers of the women's renaissance, pressing on toward its goals, and until her striving was blessed in her seeing, from the harvest of her planting, more than she had ever hoped.

Julia went on widening her mission, the spirit of the platform always within it,