6. Nothing to It

America is the greatest school in which a person may master the sciences of life and acquire practical experience that enables him to enter the global struggle—an education no school, college, or university can give.

Yet a tremendous social epidemic often appears in this great school. Its symptoms are swelling in the veins of the neck and a narrowing of the brow. Physicians have investigated the epidemic without discovering its origin or penetrating its mysteries. It has remained hidden from them, and they can prescribe no treatment to erase it from existence.

One Syrian emigrant contracted this grievous disease a year after arriving in an inland American city. It came by contagion. One day he visited a friend’s house and found him reading an Arabic newspaper. The visitor could manage only simple reading, but he sat beside his friend and joined him. Both men were delighted by a debate between the newspaper’s proprietor and a colleague—or rather, by the exchange of insults and abuse. They began glorifying the article’s author for the strength of his polemical powers and his excellence in using wounding words.

They yearned to know what the opposing writer would say in reply to what they had read in al-Sanāʾ. They therefore agreed that Nakhla al-Ṭabṭābī would subscribe to the second newspaper, Manār al-Umma. In this way they could enjoy both sides of the debate, savor the replies and responses—what So-and-so said about Such-and-such, and what the latter said in return—and then pronounce which man had excelled.[31]

Five days later Manār al-Umma arrived at Nakhla al-Ṭabṭābī’s lodging, while al-Sanāʾ continued to reach his friend, Dīb Abū Ghānim. Every day the two met and read both newspapers with close attention and exquisite pleasure. Sometimes they disagreed and sometimes they concurred over which of the two debaters—or rather, abusers—had the stronger argument.

The friends continued in this fashion until their desire to read Arabic newspapers turned into partisan allegiance, each man supporting the paper to which he subscribed. Their meetings were no longer held for the usual pleasure of reading but to dispute which newspaper struck the chord of truth and which journalist possessed the more powerful language and better-supported case.

The poisonous microbe grew stronger in the brains of both readers until it nested there and built magnificent palaces. Its first action was to pluck the strings of their zeal. Whenever either man read his newspaper, he joined the proprietor with his looks and outstripped him with his curses. Each wished that he might enter the journalists’ arena and knock the other newspaperman flat. From there the microbe led them gradually to quarrels and then to enmity.

At last the two friends became enemies. When one saw the other, he turned his face away or spat on the ground while muttering words so faint that the ears of his own lips could hardly hear them. Their hostility reached the point at which each wanted to contrive the other’s downfall.

A few days later al-Sanāʾ arrived. Dīb Abū Ghānim nearly lost his mind with joy when he saw his name at the foot of a two-column article. He read it repeatedly, then carried the paper to his neighbors, delight filling his face and making his heart leap and dance. He thrust it upon them so that they might read his article against the proprietor of Manār al-Umma.

When he entered one Syrian’s home and handed over the issue, the man answered that he could not read. But he asked Dīb to read the article aloud. For nearly an hour, Dīb spelled out the words. He would begin a sentence, reach the middle, then start it again until he succeeded in crossing it with some fragment of meaning. Sometimes he swallowed a word or two; sometimes he vomited one or two words from his mouth to cover his condition. At other moments he shook his head and cursed the newspaper’s agent for changing some of the language.

The truth was that Mr. Dīb Abū Ghānim had written the proprietor of al-Sanāʾ to say that he stood with him and wished he knew how to write, so that he might give the enemy journalist a sound roasting. The proprietor of al-Sanāʾ thereupon composed an article that would make the old women of Wāʾil dance and signed Dīb Abū Ghānim’s name to it.[32] Thus arose our friend Dīb’s joy.

News reached Nakhla al-Ṭabṭābī of what yesterday’s friend and today’s enemy, Dīb Abū Ghānim, had written in al-Sanāʾ. Rage blazed within him. First the fire of envy consumed his liver; then the microbe played with his brain. He abandoned his work and went from Syrian to Syrian asking what they had read under Dīb’s signature. He tried to find a copy of al-Sanāʾ but failed, since Dīb was its only subscriber.

Nakhla’s eyes refused sleep all night. He rose repeatedly from bed, seeking an outlet for the fire in his heart and a way to take revenge on his neighbor. At last God made the matter easy for him.

“How strange!” he thought. “I know Dīb can scarcely spell out words when he reads. How did he write a newspaper article?”

Then he told himself that if Dīb could compose articles, Nakhla al-Ṭabṭābī—that is, he himself—could write a whole volume. If there were errors, the newspaper’s proprietor would correct them. Whoever keeps to the road reaches his destination.

Nakhla took a pen in his right hand and wrote an enormous letter in lines that resembled the rivers on a map. He stuffed it full of insults and curses against the proprietor of al-Sanāʾ and its correspondent, Dīb Abū Ghānim. When he finished, he breathed freely and rejoiced beyond measure. Then he put it in an envelope and sent it by post to Manār al-Umma. It traveled on auspicious wings and reached the newspaper office, where the staff greeted it with cheers and celebration.

Needless to say, for five days Nakhla kept asking himself whether Manār al-Umma would publish his letter. Then the issue arrived. The instant he read his signature beneath an entire page, he became delirious with joy. His steps carried him over the ground like a partridge on foot, in and out of one house after another, until he had driven the contents of his letter into the head of every Syrian in town.

Nakhla and Dīb’s quarrel spread through the Syrian community of that city. The people split into two camps: this man wrapped himself in the banner of al-Sanāʾ’s proprietor, that man in the banner of Manār al-Umma’s. Syrian gatherings in homes and shops came to resemble the stock exchange: shouting was sovereign, fists pounding tables commanded the cavalry, and curses and insults were massed armies. At last the non-Syrian neighbors complained to the police.

Matters continued until hostility took root between the parties, with one useful result: both newspapers circulated throughout the town. Every Syrian, whether he could read or not, asked to subscribe to the paper of his faction, sometimes for one copy and sometimes for more. The months passed, Dīb’s writings wrestling Nakhla’s across the newspaper pages, until the causes of the dispute disappeared.

The sensible men of New York—or those who feared for their hides beneath the newspaper proprietors’ whips—met in a salon and decided to reconcile the journalists. By a political stratagem, they managed to bring the two opposites together. They made peace between them and pressed a handsome check into each man’s hand.

Both newspapers reported the incident in their columns. Each explained that its hostility toward its colleague had resulted from a misunderstanding and that impersonal debate remained indispensable. It therefore bore no rancor toward its neighbor or its proprietor. Since every cause of disagreement had vanished, each paper shook the other’s hand in brotherhood to raise this beloved community toward the hoped-for summits of progress and advancement.

Reader, do not ask how much disgust this news produced in Dīb, Nakhla, and every Syrian in the town where they lived. The people were astonished by a reconciliation that came at the wrong time and spoiled the pleasure they had taken in reading Arabic newspapers.

After a few days, they all remained hostile to one another, only now without gatherings or debates. One by one, however, they returned the newspapers to their proprietors, excusing themselves on the ground that they could not subscribe at present.

The two journalists met in a salon.

“How is business?” one asked the other.

“During the debate, it could not have been better!”

“Yes, mine was the same. But now returned copies increase every day.”

“It appears the people enjoy newspapers only when there is a fight.”

“If debate promotes circulation, why should we not debate?”

“That is my view. Let us begin tomorrow. I shall start with an article straight from the bottom of the cauldron.”[33]

At an evening gathering, I found myself among a group that included a man reading an Arabic newspaper with intense eagerness, wholly indifferent to the company’s conversation. I approached and handed him an issue I had kept in my pocket because it contained the most eloquent article I had ever read on its subject, entitled “Our Syrian Life.”

“You seem to enjoy reading,” I said. “Take this issue and read that article.”

He accepted it. After laboring over the title and first line, he folded the paper and returned it.

“Nothing to it.”[34]

He resumed the newspaper he had been reading. I looked to see what subject had captured his ardor in the middle of that crowded gathering. Beneath the title “That Despicable Journalist,” I saw lines of print.

I returned to my place repeating his phrase—“Nothing to it”—and never again thrust myself into other people’s affairs.

NOTES

[31] The titles appear to be satirical inventions. Al-Sanāʾ means “Splendor” or “Radiance”; Manār al-Umma means “The Nation’s Beacon.”
[32] Wāʾil is the eponymous ancestor of major Arab tribal groupings. The mock-heroic phrase means an article so stirring that even the tribe’s old women would dance.
[33] Syrian colloquial min kaʿb al-dist, literally “from the bottom of the cauldron,” intensifies what follows: the bottom is the hottest and blackest part. Here it promises a maximally fierce article.
[34] Colloquial mā fīhā shī can mean “there is nothing in it,” “it contains nothing worthwhile,” or “it is nothing.” The title and final repetition exploit all three senses.
