resting place; in you are anguish and concealment and the welling of renewal, and around you the secrets of the divine outpouring commune with your despair — with the whispers of Babylon, with the inspirations of Egypt, with all that arose of civilizations and flourished of building and gathered and stood forth of majesty in the Fertile Crescent, with the states that were humbled before your glory and the peoples and nations that passed away, with all the exultation and praise of God that poured forth in the Arabian Peninsula, sister of holiness, nobility, and sacrifice!

Want and pestilence crowd within you, while the West drinks its fill of sufficiency and health; and instead of breathing brotherhood into your faithful spirit, its con-quering powers whet within you hatred and aversion, so that your noble breast lies still beneath the rancor of a cursing resentment!

Why does idleness eye you with a sick eye, and chaos grow fertile in your generous expanses, as if languor were driving your hesitating steps!

O structure of the years, O son of noble deeds — the hand of progress has been busily at work in the clever West while you crouch huddled behind amulets and talismans, tortured by stupor, seared by fretfulness and sloth!

So give me your fevered hand, withered with burns and scars, and put away from you the gloom of the ages; give me those rare, delicate fingers that once carried the signs of the mind to the whole world — stretch them out, that we may press upon them the kisses of contrition, and give them full measure of duty and work!

Here is the lyre of the birds play-ing melodies for me; here are the droplets of the waters mirrored on the thickets, telling the thirst of dreams, forming a ring that turns dancing between the gentleness of the gazelles

and the chanting of the children! Here is the mingling of warblings with waves of perfume in a garden that draws the curtain back from the mysteries of imagination!

But you, my homeland, lie crouched here in a breast tormented by longing for your growth — for your growth, for your attainment of the kaaba of perfection; and so it labors, groaning, over your horizons, lamenting your whirlwind, burst-ing, anguished, asking: how shall you be pushed forward?!

How shall I become, for your sake, a thief — gathering up the warblings and picking out the melodies, stealing the outward

forms of refinement and progress, slipping away with my hand upon the reins of that order which raises a nation's standing and refines its individuals!

How shall I make off with something of the freshness of this abundant joy, and these deep, clear laughs, and these exquisite, well-ordered gardens — and pour them out over your dwellings... how shall I plunder this gentle-ness, this delicacy, this nobility of character?!!