If we stripped this story of the frame with which Shafiq al-Faqih has surrounded it, it would appear an ordinary story. It is the story of every day, the story of love between two, with the girl's family standing in its way, ending, usually, in the triumph of the reactionary mentality over the will to freedom and to escape from the bonds of social enslavement which make of the girl — and sometimes the young man — a slave to the wishes of parents who view their children's interest through their own thinking, their own upbringing, and their own problems, without trying to move forward with the age and with education.
The author wished not to distract the reader from the study he intended in his book, so he spared him all thought of the ending and the plot by placing them at the beginning of the book, in order to direct him wholly to following his thoughts and opinions.
In Shafiq al-Faqih there is resentment, and revolt, and perhaps despair. So his opinions come as the offspring of a problem he has lived rather than the outcome of a concentrated study.
The author is a painter, of the “super-realist” (surrealism) school. He has adorned his book — or not adorned it — with drawings in this manner, and has tried to make his story of this kind. In some of it he has succeeded.
Shafiq al-Faqih in this story calls to an absolute negativism which — but for flashes of pain and depth of thought that came to him in clearness of mind — would appear destructive.
Revolt is building. And building is a positive work.
An Uproar in a Village is a story read with some eagerness and with thought. It is the vanguard of a production which we expect to be more concentrated and more single in idea.
It is an ordinary story in an extraordinary frame. And it is, in the end, “a story I would not wish to write.”
A book by Dr. Sabri al-Qabbani
In it the author tries to establish the theory which says: “A woman is ready for conception on only five days of the month; once she knows them, she can command her own offspring...”
In treating the subject Dr. Qabbani leans upon a body of Western specialists who preceded us in these studies and in verifying their soundness or unsoundness. Among what he says:
“Among the paradoxes that pass before me — and not a month goes by without their appearing in my clinic —
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