From the Realms of Civilization

What noble aim has carried our budding woman writer to England? We surmise that she is there to add to her store of learning and to explore the boundless horizons of knowledge.

From London, Hibah al-Wadi writes to us some of her musings and observations, in that style of hers of consummate elegance! Our heartfelt greetings to her...

Here are the dark towers, whetting my readiness for melancholy and sorrow!

Here is London!

Foster child of a civilization grown great by the long striving of patience and calm! In her the churches and cathedrals rise high, the institutes of the sciences and the arts crowd her breast, and the theaters, the museums, and the places of gaiety and ease press one upon another within her long-appointed bounds!

Never does she mass herself before my gaze but I fancy myself before a canvas teeming with every kind of motion and stir, wrapped in the veil of fruitful toil — laughing and playful, grave and stern — urged onward by persevering efforts and keen, strong resolves!

And no sooner do I glimpse the heedless banks of cloud in her ether than I am gathered up in longing for the generous disks of sunlight scattered over the shores of Lebanon, the plains of Syria, and the banks of the Tigris, the Nile, and the Jordan!

But this London, like a person of splendid persistence, has never wanted a thing but she wrested it away, by the magic of that strangeness which attends all things unique!

Here is the overwhelming city striving to draw me in — I, an atom vanishing in the enormity of her bulk, the vastness of her distances, and the surging tumult of her people!

I take not a single step among her edifices but the ages of enchantment hold sway, addressing in me the love of the centuries; and the glimmer of antiquity shows itself, piercing deep into the soul, fathomless, trailing at its edges, driven on by the dreams and images that traced her existence a single century after the birth of Christ!

And my spirit is bewitched by the remembrance of saints and warriors, lawgivers and thieves and slain men! The old happenings spring up before my eyes, and come to birth free and unbound, with all that once beset them of abasement and pride, of victory and rout!

No sooner do I recall the sting of the calamities that assailed her than her general steadfastness awes me — weaving about her the robes of stability with threads of gentleness and wisdom; and no sooner do her storming winds appear, her pealing lightnings and her rushing torrents, than my mind grasps how the very climate settles upon the ways of her life, refining her and setting her upright, and teaching her that ordeal and gloom must at last be wiped away by clearness and purity — so that when the trial comes round again she neither despairs nor repents, since she neither beams too readily with glad cheer nor melts away in promise and hope!

From her practiced discernment of beauty, taste grows and ascends, and a tremor of every feeling passes through it. Why does the art of acting upon her stages awaken my deepest gladness?

Why do the opera houses and the exhibitions of sculpture and painting stir tears in my unyielding heart? And why do I sigh, aching, before the grandeur of her museums?

Are these teardrops a confirmation of the individual's insignificance and the smallness of his estate? Or are they pity for my own soul, borne away by splendor? Or is it the pain that my country's share in the procession of creation should be so slight, so thin!

Oh, these observatories that command the quarters of her sky, wearing the robe of the fortune-teller, taking on his very person in the unveiling of hidden things, bearing his wise brow and his piercing, dreaming eyes!

They read the ciphers of the planets and the stars, the riddles of the comets and the nebulae; every mystery and every impossibility yields to their scrutiny and their insight; and their knowledge marks out its communion with the heavens and its converse with the stars in the language of numbers and the idiom of figures and microscopes!

Oh, the sanatoriums and hospitals laboring without pause to restore balance to a frame that sways between survival and extinction! Oh, the compassionate fingertips that hold the scalpels to draw out the pains of darkened hearts! And oh, the gentle silence brooding over their knowing brows!

Since courteous phrases first greeted my hearing, and I saw the radiance of soft and tender smiles, I have bidden farewell to all racialism and division, and felt that nations are stricken only that they may rise, and peoples falter only to make ready for the far courses; and that the store of well-being which civilization guards is a roving current over the face of the globe, moving between its lines of longitude and latitude, drawn to and fro by alertness and brilliance, by industry and firmness of character. Just as of old it sped running to Athens, and hastened on toward Rome, and coursed between Baghdad and Andalusia — where it dwelt for centuries, breathing knowledge and skill — so is it today in London. How, then, should I not be carried away by her — this civilization nourished on the fruits of Ibn Rushd and Abbas ibn Firnas?!

The spans and the miles exude brightness in the most thronged and crowded of her places, as though the sense of responsibility stood embodied in every breast; and a sternness looks out that has mastered emotion and fancy. Under what heading shall my astonishment reckon this progress of hers?! Who is it that has spread enlightenment among her millions, and melted away the features of poverty and grief, filling that awesome multitude with gladness and delight?!

Is it fate and its decree that have descended upon her? Then why do we not summon it to ourselves with talismans and spells, with prayers and amulets fitted to our heedless Eastern souls — we whom disasters and calamities grind to nothing!

Oh, the glory of the women of London! Oh, the brisk working women — the ticket takers, the hotel workers, the shop girls — their faces alight with the pride of unwearied endeavor, with the freshness of that urgent duty which spreads abroad a woman's moral beauty and prepares the means of her nation's rise!

Would that the past mistresses of indolent ease, those women blind to work in my beloved country, might see them..!

London — Hibah al-Wadi