ing no one to fault their work with so much as a word.

The word of the home is, in my view, the first word.. and the family's agreement that the language of the homeland is the one that must be the most sacred, above every other language.. car-ries its weight in the matter.. And the jabbering that displays itself in our homes and our streets and our gatherings, when we speak the foreign language or utter a single sentence in a mixture of the two tongues, is chargeable first of all to the home.

Do we really wish to believe that the schools have made of these citizens people who cannot speak Arabic well..? And that its letters are rough on the throat — good heavens..? If you insisted on conversing with them in Arabic you would find them speaking it fluently, without any difficulty.. What, then, is the secret of this affectation..

I believe that behind it lies an inferiority complex.. a feeling that we stand lower in rank than the other nations.. so that we are ashamed of our Arabness.. and boast that we cannot speak it well.

This inferiority complex was formed in the wake of our long servitude.. In the days of his glory the Arab would enter the presence of Chosroes Anushirvan and address him in Arabic, though he knew Persian well. He might be barefoot, his garment threadbare, but his soul butted the clouds.. and his Arabness rose high above the Iwan of Chosroes.. a conquering nation, victorious in every place, which stamped even Andalusia with its victorious Arab stamp.. Then, when the state fell and split into petty states.. and when the people, here and there, came under the rule of conquerors, souls were abased and began to curry favor with

their rulers.. and the first form of that flattery was to speak the language of their rulers.. and then to disown their own language and their Arabness.

It would have been well — all to the good — had our schools been our own.. teaching our young to take pride in their Arabness, and that the time of domination over us has passed.. teaching our young that we are a nation that once conquered East and West.. and that, besides the conquests and their masters — the likes of Saladin and Ibn Tariq — we gave the world Avicenna, whose medical works were translated into Latin and other tongues and are still taught in the greatest institutes of the West.. and that

Hunayn ibn Ishaq was the first to know the surgery of the eye and wrote books upon it.. and that for three hundred years the world read nothing but books written in Arabic.. and that a nation which gives the world such a treasure of learning as we gave will not die — its potentialities remain latent within it.. and that we are a nation with much to be proud of and to hold its head high for. And that other nations have tumbled once, as we did, and were not abased.. and that tomorrow is ours.. as yesterday was ours.

I would have longed for our schools to be ours, that they might do all this. But since they are not ours — where, then, are our homes and our mothers..?

There are some half a million people — publishers, booksellers, actors, lecturers, museum curators, tourist guides, and others — who earn their livings thanks to the most famous British playwright, William Shakespeare...

Among the Mark Twain literary collection displayed at the St. Louis museum in America, the visitor may see a letter addressed to the writer's wife, on which the husband noted the following remark: 'Opened by mistake, to find out what it contained!'

• A man grown rich on the war stood before an old bed in one of the shops that sell antiques ('antica'). The shopkeeper noticed the man's admiration for the bed, and came up to him, saying: – In this bed slept the three kings: Louis the Fourteenth, Louis the Fifteenth, and Louis the Sixteenth! The war-rich man smiled and answered: – I had always believed that every one of those kings could afford to buy himself a bed of his own, without having to share it with anybody!..