"The Woman's Voice" Questions Sheikh Said Takieddine

From time to time, engaging personalities visit the editorial office, and we find it good taste to converse with them and record some of what passes on their tongues...

No sooner had Sheikh Said Takieddine's feet touched the floor of the office than we showered questions upon him of every color and kind, and he did not hesitate a moment in answering them all — and with a great deal of self-confidence!

Sheikh Said Takieddine is no stranger to us — the readers of "The Woman's Voice" — for we have known him as the foremost Lebanese storyteller; we have read him, and wept at times, and laughed at times — he is of his own weave — a weave without match!

And we have known him as a former president of the Alumni Association of the American University: pure activity, that man! Neither the Association nor the magazine "al-Kulliyah" has known an era like his, in which words were wedded to deeds, and which brought forth a splendid club that is today the gathering place of the alumni and the meeting point of friends.

"The Woman's Voice" is pleased to record Sheikh Said Takieddine's conversation.

What is your opinion of the story?
— Which story? All of life is stories.

I meant the written short story — the literary story.
— I do not know how to study literature. My task is to create literature. Most of those who study literature are the ones who failed at creating it. A million sifters at a threshing floor holding twenty-six mudd of wheat, forty mudd of barley, and a heap of darnel.

What problems does literature face today?
— The problem of the pashas of literature, for one.

I don't understand. Who are the pashas?
— Those who have puffed themselves up and whose fame has spread without production — or with silly production. Every day there breaks loose from the "commoners," with the publication of a book or with a poem, someone who deserves from us at the very least a salute of admiration. Yet no one pays him any heed. For we have carried our feudal thinking in society over into literature: we still bow before the pashas, and we make no room in our esteem for the obscure commoners. Take the book "Thirty Poems" by a young man named Tawfiq Sayigh. That book felled me. Who has read it? Who has written about it? If we abolished pasha-hood in literature, put to death the cicadas of "criticism," burned some of the dry firewood, and rang the bells for every Tawfiq Sayigh who appears, our measures would begin to come right.

And the university youth — do you consider it wise for them to plunge into party and political activity?
— People confuse the meanings of the word "party." If the purpose of a "party" is to mobilize a mass of people driven toward a political goal in its base sense, then it is a crime for students or youths to be in that mass. But if the party is, in its essence, a cultural renaissance that teaches the member his duties and responsibilities, and the philosophy of his country's history and its future, and the role the citizen must play — if these are the aims of the party, any party, and it advances them along a course steered by reason, not on sails puffed by passions to voyage across an ocean of emotional froth — then the joining of young men, and young women (don't forget the young women), to this renaissance becomes a national necessity that our schools and our homes have neglected. In the party, then, we are taught what our fathers neglected to instill in us, and what our schools neglected.

Does this activity not distract students from their primary responsibility — study?
— A true renaissance makes the student a better student, just as