Just Flights of Fancy

A flight to Tunis

The government of Tunisia deserves a salute.
When it tore from woman the legend of the beautiful animal, and gave her, in awareness, the quality of a human being.

Rising Tunisia wants itself green, and it has known how to begin.
And the law was humane when it forbade the Tunisian man to marry more than one wife; and when it fixed fifteen as the lowest age for a girl's marriage; and when it granted the young woman her freedom to choose her life partner once she reaches twenty.

And the government of Tunisia is the second government in a Muslim country — after Turkey — to adopt this step in law, tying its destiny to noble values without straying from the spirit of religion.
And it adopted it of its own choice, without insistence from women's associations that fight with petitions, as with us...
The step in itself is a great victory, one for which our associations ought to bestir themselves — if only with a petition...

On the margin of the first flight

The American 'Time' published the news of the law and said, in effect, that the credit goes back to the head of the Tunisian government, Habib Bourguiba, who is married to a Frenchwoman.
I seemed to sense from the spirit of the report — and I may be wrong — that Bourguiba's progressiveness is something owed to his French wife.
Very well, Time magazine.

We do not begrudge that French wife of his this credit,
nor do we deny that any wife of any leader can do something...
Indeed, we may be rather inclined to grant it to her; perhaps Bourguiba's step arose from her situation as his wife...
For he realized that marriage to one wife is no eating of halva — so what of four??...

The voice that is a fortune

Fairuz and I were sitting, one generous evening, on the balcony of Assi Rahbani's house at Antelias.

Above us a sky in which a moon-boat was sailing, and before us Beirut, sleeping on the shoulder of the sea with a great deal of coquetry.

Fairuz was murmuring a new melody when suddenly she fell silent and shook my shoulder in excitement, asking: Didn't you see it?
I said: What?

She said: A star fell, and our sea swallowed it.
Fairuz kept gazing a moment at the space from which a star had slipped loose; then, after her calm had returned, she asked me:
Didn't you wish for something?

I said, without understanding her question: And what should I wish?

She said: The custom is for people to wish for something when they see a star falling.
I asked her, smiling: And did you wish?

She said: Yes — a long life (for Ziad).
And I turned to Fairuz — Fairuz, who forgot that she has a voice that seduces the moon and raises up, when she sings, a thousand stars; she did not wish for more fame, nor rank, nor a balance in a bank, nor even a small villa cradled by an enamored mountain.
All this Fairuz forgot,
and she remembered only that she is a 'mother.'
And I bowed to Fairuz and her motherhood in reverence!