The Veiled University Girl

Are you going back to Hama? With the heavy veil for company? While we, your girl friends, hurry to the balcony to feast our gaze on the last trace of submission!

Do you go with your face curtained in the niqab, its black density barring the passage of light from your eyes, darkening the sight of the cheerful sun, and through it the colors of blossom and rose and the blue sky spoiled!

Do you walk on this way, panting under the weight of torpor, joining, contented, the galling procession of the burqa-wearers, your elbow brushing the side of a grandmother and an aunt!

Tear it up, my friend! Destroy its painful weave — the fingers of fetters wove it — and lift its grim shape from your round head. Can the sense of justice stand straight in you while upon your head the pins sear with the pricking of nails? Tell those who rule over your affairs what you found within the university. Do you forget the poise of free movement, the sweetness of magnanimity, and the splendor of noble conduct!

Do you remember the day you came asking after the young man, your fellow student, and how it would be within the walls of learning — while shyness hid behind your voice and constraint showed in the features of your face! Then how you came back after a while polishing your words, bringing out their glitter, and folding into their meanings the magic of principle and the beauty of rectitude!

Tell your people how the university refined the sense of dignity in you, so that you prayed God in your secret heart that every brilliance might steal into your mind, that quickness might spring upon your tongue, that spiritual stagnation might die, and every dullness and every triviality be overcome!

Tear off this veil — the symbol of scorn for your moral integrity — and follow the call of your inborn nature. Are you content to have your soul chained — you who parry nature itself, to create a perfection out of every lack, and who draw from the very pictures of cheapness what kindles the conscience of your chastity and fires your zeal for the proud course!

This scrap of flimsy weave, those frail black threads, their density locking arms over women's faces to impound their gifts, suck up the signs of their intelligence, and finish off whatever marks of goodness are in them, striking them altogether dumb — have you no pity for the powers massed behind a mask!

Do you veil your mother's daughter, who answered

Would she accept the veil, submissive, after the example of a grandmother and a mother... even after she has come to know university life?!

the human being of flesh and blood, weighed out in carats of gold and diamond!

In your house is a thing more wondrous than the calf that was worshipped, or the sun that was bowed down to, or than a veil to which your grandmother resigned herself and with which your neighbor was content — she being like you — you, O university girl in whose inmost garden feelings of dread toward it lie crouching!

Shall we measure the leaping mind against the contentment of stagnant minds, or compare the breaking heart with the rigid hearts at rest!

Our souls follow after you, our tormented sister. Can it be this veil that wears you out?

Does it exhaust you — this thing which, to those who imposed it on you, means a whole world of virtue?!

How is it you do not welcome virtue, and open your heart's core to it for a dwelling?

The great, creative virtue; the wondrous virtue that swings in the world of men between one interpretation and one estimation; this virtue whose meaning changes as the ages pass it from hand to hand, whose direction branches with the difference of distances and spans; that which wears the stamp of knighthood here and struts in the garment of knowledge there, which at one time is the daughter of utter deprivation of the good things of living, and after a time becomes the peer of the kindling of talents and the growth of the spirit. This magnificent virtue, forever bound to the relative! Which some suppose to be folded up in a gauze over a girl's face!

Do you deny it, embodied in the face-veil that keeps your forehead from the pits of burning and guards your lashes from the slippery slopes of evil!

Welcome, my little friend, the symbol of purity — for men have taken as their symbols, since the most ancient of ages, wonders and marvels!

Can the veil be the symbol of virtue