To the Women of My Country

In bold patriotic cries, in the call to sacred national duty, and in the recording of deeds of heroism, no woman's pen rises above the pen of the writer Asma Tubi.
With a wounded patriot's pride she accompanied the revolts of Palestine: she honored valor and self-sacrifice, condemned all hanging back from the supreme national duty, and enlisted her free pen as a torch lighting for the Arab young the road of right and unity..
In the following lines Mrs. Asma Tubi records a shining page from the history of the Arab woman.

In the Great War one of Germany's greatest commanders, “General Randolph,” was killed, and his comrades walked in his funeral with his grieving wife in their midst.. Before his tomb she stepped forward to eulogize him, and she opened her speech with the words, “O Germans, Randolph is dead..” Then she went on, her head lifted in pride, to number what her great husband had done for his nation.

And the newspapers plunged into the subject — not Germany's papers only, but even our own Arab papers.. They spoke not of Randolph or of his valiant deeds.. but of his courageous wife.. the woman who shed no tears, but stood boasting of her husband's heroism.. and of his death for the sake of his country.

Today hearts turn to the Arab nation.. to dear Egypt.. victorious Egypt.. and they ask: how many a woman there will not weep for her martyred husband, though her heart bleed?? Nay, rather, how many a woman drove her husband and her children before her and marched with them to the battle??

Nine days of searing heroism in Egypt.. nine days while earth and sky and sea together rained iron and fire upon this one city.. and the city did not sink to its knees and surrender.. nine days while an entire people.. men and women.. old men and children.. every one of them took up his weapon and went out to fight..

How every one of those nine hours brims with tales of immortal heroism that pens will set down tomorrow.. they will record and record and still not encompass it all, for it is more than can be counted.. And in the forefront of what they will record are heroisms of woman that bewilder the mind.. and astound.

The Arab nation — those forefathers who gave their blood in sacrifice, and it runs in our veins, we the grandchildren.. When they sacrificed they drew no line between man and woman.. indeed, perhaps in nothing were they so evenhanded as in the heritage of heroism they bestowed upon us all — man and woman alike.

Our still appearance may well deceive.. so that in the foreigner's eye we seem as though this blood in our veins ran its calm, accustomed course.. But let our national being once be touched and assaulted.. and this blood rises up, and we go forward.. and history goes on recording.

And history has recorded much.. In dozens of Palestinian villages it recorded astonishing heroisms.. those women who carried food up to the rebels in the mountains and sent their ululations after them, more than one of them falling dead under the soldiers' bullets.. and that woman whose husband did not go out with the rebels, so she brought a basket of ashes and emptied it over his head, saying: this is the coward's reward.. and that woman who entrenched herself in Wadi Rabab, around Jerusalem, and went on in silence picking off every soldier who passed, until she had killed 12 soldiers and was killed in her turn — so they changed the name of the valley to hers, and it became “Wadi Helweh.”

And that woman who stood outside the prison awaiting the fate of her hero son.. and when he was hanged inside the prison, the mother sang.. sang for the hero whose death for his country is glory.. then she ululated.. And the poet of Arabism, Tuqan, recorded the scene in his magnificent poem, from which:

I swear by your mother, as she cried out
in song upon the day of your death

Where, beside this bereaved, ululating mother, is the stoical wife of the German commander..?

O West.. we do not wipe away our tears before your bullets.. we sing and we ululate..

And those women who lived on the line of fire for eight years.. what were they doing every evening in those villages standing upon the border, sleepless lest they be caught unawares?

There the woman kept watch through the night beside the border guard.. flattening herself upon the ground, watching and listening for every faintest sound.. or squatting on her heels, cleaning the weapons and making them ready for battle.. or, at the hour of danger, springing forward to fire from the front, or to pass the ammunition from behind..

It is a nation in which woman, everywhere, has learned to sing forever as her grandmother sang:

And in war we wear the weave of iron,
and in peace we love fine silk and floss