The years pass... and man, everlasting, weaves wishes and struggles, stubbornly, to fulfill them.
In this swift, decisive interval between an old year passing away and the light of a new year, I set out to a select group of our ladies, in search of “a wish each of them fulfilled in the past year, and a wish she will work to fulfill
1 — Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush
in the year to come!” And the answers were these:
1 — Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush
A holy supplication — a call to return to God — is Dr. Jamal's wish, to the letter:
For the answer of Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush proved a supplication that brings our materialistic man back to God, and to His teachings, His lights, and His glad tidings.
The Doctor confided her wish
to me on a sunny morning after snowstorms, and it flowed into my thoughts gently, that I might distill it, drop by drop, into yours:
“My wish is that the world should meet God, so that man may meet his brother man! My wish is that God grant us the grace of patience, that we may try to build anew each time we fail; that we believe in the ideal, that we may draw nearer to God; and that we conquer our evils, so that peace may triumph!”
Her gentle, spiritual way of thinking astonished me — and she is kindness itself. She smiled serenely and answered: The finest wish that came true for me in the past year was the full recovery of my “health,” which helps me carry out my professional and social duties...
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2 — “We are old-timers; why don't you dig for the
I knew that Dr. Saniyya Habboub
new wishes?”
She would put me off — politely, forcefully, by any possible means — so I gathered my courage and answered her:
In the street I meet thousands of ladies, millions of people, who may not possess a single idea to fight for — and an old wish is like a rare antique...
She cut me short:
— “Look, my dear, my heart chirps when I see troops of girls entering the university and leaving it for the great world. My hope for the future is in the Muslim woman — I mean the one who has gained a complete education, one that fits her to enter the battle; so that woman may live by her own powers, her own aims, her own personality, all her own capacities — not a dependent on the man who has taught her to expect his protection.”
And I could not help admiring the personality of Dr. Saniyya Habboub; I warmed to her stern, radiant, then tender glances, and I asked her about her house, her children, her husband. She welcomed me into her orderly domestic world and whispered in my ear a wish fulfilled in the past year: she visited America, after 25 years. She went back to the medical school where she had specialized. She came upon her fellow students — and behold, one was a professor and a dean, another the owner of a hospital. And behold, she was living her youth over again, as though she had left the