Flights of Fancy

Flights of Fancy

A schoolteacher friend told me a story that happened to him while he was teaching his pupils some new vocabulary, among it the word "Perhaps," whose meaning in Arabic is "rubbama." He then asked a pupil to repeat the word after him, but the boy could not manage the letter P, pronouncing it the way the B is pronounced in Arabic.

The teacher went on repeating the word before him, then asked him to say it again, and still he insisted on making the P a B that grated on the ear. At last, after the boy had succeeded in mastering its pronunciation, the teacher asked him its meaning in Arabic—and he said "rubbama," and the Arabic B came out a Frankish P.

I sank into laughter with my teacher friend.

This is one story—teachers may meet with things among their pupils even more provoking of hearty laughter—but I found it to fit remarkably the speed with which we sell off the forefront of our personality.

The foreigner lives among us a year, two years, ten years, twenty years, and remains a foreigner in his thinking, a foreigner in his conduct, a foreigner in his speech and in his civilization and in... And we travel to any place in the inhabited world—let us say America, for example—for a stretch of time that may not exceed two months, or a year, or two, or as long as God pleases... and our first concern is to pour ourselves into their crucible, so that we Americanize ourselves in speech and conduct and thinking and in taking up their ways of life, until the lines of our true personalities are erased.

Adaptation and accommodation, in due measure, may be commendable; but with us the matter reaches the point of excess, to the degree of disowning everything that is authentic in us—and the result, most often, is a personality of blurred and runny features.

I say this as I try to find, in the class that has been schooled in the West or has rubbed against it a little or much, a soil on which the modern Arab personality might be built—and I find crooked lines with no personality, neither here nor there.

In my belief, the time has come for us to learn when to say Perhaps with the P, and when our B should be Arab in spirit—and in articulation...

Last month a friend asked me to come and speak to the girls of the secondary classes at the school where she teaches, and together we decided that the talk should consist of setting forth a particular point of view to be proposed by the girls themselves.

I welcomed the opportunity, since it allowed me to study the angle from which these girls, tender of stem, look out upon life.

It was quite natural that their interest should center first of all on matters of the heart, for they asked me all manner of questions which, if they indicate anything, are proof of the great bewilderment of these girls.

It was plain that every one of them needed a companion to take her by the hand and say to her: This is life, my girl—open your eyes and learn how to place your steps...

And I left the school more firmly convinced that the mission of the home reaches far beyond food and clothing and shelter and the provision of school expenses...

I call upon every mother and father to be friends to their children, to cast off that stiffness which prevails in the Eastern home between parents and children, and to talk with them about things their children are not accustomed to confide to them frankly—for they seek the answer anywhere at all except from their fathers and mothers...

Otherwise, let them not lift their eyes in astonishment if every boy and girl bolts off headlong on his own way...

Believe me, the road is rugged... and you are more complacent than you have any right to be...

A "please" works wonders—indeed more than wonders at times—if only we learned how to make it the constitution of our dealings.

And the wonder is that we are the people who use it least.

You do not believe it? Then come, let us count the number of times the members of other nations use this word in a single day, and we shall find that it exceeds our use of it over an entire month.

Open a foreign magazine and leaf through it: at the foot of most pages you will find the phrase, "Please turn the page."

Board a bus and you will find a notice saying, "Please do not speak to the driver"; its counterpart in our buses: "Speaking to the driver forbidden. Spitting forbidden. Putting hands and head out of the windows forbidden."

Enter a shop and you will find that the notice forbidding the customer to buy on credit is a gracious one—"Kindly pay cash"—while among us, who will settle for anything less than "Credit forbidden," with sometimes above it: "and bashfulness is dispensed with, and livelihood is God's affair."

I consider "please" the key that unlocks people's souls and hearts. How I should love my words to fall under the eye of the owner of a certain large building in this city, who has hung upon the door of the electric elevator the following notice:

"By order of the owner of the building: use of the elevator for going down is forbidden."

Consider, I beg you, "By order of the owner of this building," and judge for yourselves what taste is enjoyed by a person who assumes that all people should bow to his gracious orders merely because he owns a building...

And do you want the truth?... Not once have I tried to obey the order—not out of any fear of the fatigue of walking down thirty or twenty steps on my own feet, but purely and simply for the love of defying the sultan's decree...

And many others besides me do the same, and for the very same purpose...

So what says the owner of the building... of his unobeyed order..????