4.1.7
How I wish the presence in your home of a hundred books did not count as less of a witness to good fortune than that of a hundred tobacco pipes or a hundred water pipes, even though the cost of a hundred books is less than that of three pieces of amber!294 Isn’t the presence of a printing press in your country more important than all these cashmere shawls, sables, precious vessels, and expensive pieces of jewelry? If a person looks at a piece of jewelry, he derives no benefit from it either for his body or his brain; his pleasure in it lasts no longer than the month in which he bought it, and after a few months have passed it’s no more to him than scrap metal, the only pleasure to be derived from it being that of selling it. A book, on the other hand, grows more valuable with each passing year, and its benefits multiply. Are not your readings in history, geography, and the literatures of the world an adornment to you among your brethren and acquaintances that surpasses gemstones? If you teach your family and dependents a portion of such things and, from books of medicine, of the principles necessary for the preservation of their health, will you not win reward from God and protection from many an injury that might befall them as a result of their ignorance?
4.1.8
If you say, “We have no books in Arabic suitable for women,” I reply, “Supposing you are right, do not the Franks have books written by refined and virtuous men specially for women and children? Why do you buy fabrics and furnishings from the Franks and not knowledge, wisdom, or literature? Then again, no matter what lengths you may go to in order to shield your wife from seeing the world, you will never be able to hide it from her heart. A woman, wherever and however she be, is this world’s daughter and its mother, sister, and co-wife. Do not say to me, ‘A book won’t set an evil woman to rights but will make her yet more wicked, and if she’s righteous, she doesn’t need one,’ for I will reply that a woman was a girl before she became a woman and a man was once a boy. No one can deny that educating the young is like carving on rock and that if you raise your offspring with knowledge, general education, virtue, and praiseworthy qualities, they will grow up as you have raised them and you will have performed the duty that God has imposed upon you of making them into decent people, in which case you will leave them (after a long life, God willing) with a clear conscience and a mind at ease and serene.”
4.1.9
The only argument left to you is to say, “My father gave me no education, just as my grandfather gave my father none, and I have followed in their footsteps,” but I tell you, the world in your late grandfather’s and father’s day was not as it is now. In their day, there were no steamboats or railway tracks to bring close far-off tracts and create new pacts, to connect the disconnected, and make accessible what was once protected. Then, one didn’t have to learn many languages. It could be said of anyone who knew a few words of Turkish — Welcome, my lord! How nice to see you, my lord! — that he’d make a fine interpreter at the imperial court, and of any who could write a hand worse than the hand with which I have penned this book (not the one you’re actually reading now, for whose typeface I take no responsibility)295 that he was a skilled calligrapher who would make a fine secretary to a king’s council. Not now!
4.1.10
When our friend the Fāriyāq made his decision to leave the island for England, someone told him, “You are going to a land over which the sun never rises”; another, “… to a land where no wheat or green vegetables grow and the only foods to be had are meat and turnips”;296 another, “I fear that you may lose your lungs there for lack of air”; another, “or your intestines for lack of food”; and another, “or your chest or some other part of your body.” When he got there, though, he found that the sun was the sun, the air air, water water, men men, and women women, that the land was populated and the cities well inhabited, the earth plowed and pleasing to the eye, well signposted and marked, resplendent with woods, mighty trees, and forests, green with meadows, proud in its fields, succulent in the green vegetables its soil yields; had he listened to those people, he would have missed seeing all of that. Thus, if you’re afraid that you would hanker for the pleasures of the water pipe or of having your legs massaged before going to sleep, know that the marvels you will see there will make you forget all such luxuries and distract you from everything to which, in your noble position in society, you have become accustomed.
4.1.11
How can you allow yourself to leave this world without ever having seen it when you have the means to do so? Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī has said
And no failing have I seen among men
To equal the falling short of those who have means.
How can you limit yourself to knowing a quarter of a language297 and not yearn to know what others think? Under their hats may be ideas and thoughts that have never occurred to what’s under your tarbush — so much so that, did you but comprehend them, you’d wish you could have been their thinker’s contemporary, had the honor of his acquaintance, and held a splendid feast for him, decorated with sheaves of rice and wheat. How can you have reached the thirtieth year of your life without composing something of benefit to the people of your country? All I see before you are ledgers of sale and purchase, pages of outgoings and incomings, and letters full of corrupt phrases and lame expressions over which you pore morning and evening.
4.1.12
If, on the other hand, your intention in traveling is simply to be able to boast and say, for example, during some gathering when your noble friends and mighty peers are visiting, “I saw such and such a city and beheld its wide clean streets, spacious homes, fine ships, magnificent markets, beautiful horses, wonderful women, and hosts of soldiers, and ate such and such there on the first day and drank such and such on the second, after which we went to a place of entertainment and from there to a lady who entertains and I spent the night with her on a soft bed, and in front of the bed there was a large mirror as long and wide as the bed itself, so I could see myself in it just as I was in the bed, and then I got up in the morning and a bonny maid brought us breakfast (liquid or otherwise) and then I went back to my lodgings and found so-and-so waiting for me, the time being then eleven o’clock, or about an hour before noon, and we set off together for the park known as the Royal Park and while we were walking there, looking at the towering trees and ornamental flowers, I suddenly caught sight of the girl I’d spent the night with walking with a man who was paying court to her and when she saw me, she smiled and said hello, and her greeting didn’t seem to upset the man, for he doffed his hat to me, and I was very much surprised at his lack of jealousy, as, had the girl been mine, I’d have hidden her from the light,” then it all amounts to nothing but what’s called in chaste Arabic hadhar (“prating”), hurāʾ (“prattling”), haft (“nonsense”), harj (“confusion”), halj (“making incredible claims”), saqaṭ (“false reporting”), haysh (“talking too much”), watagh (“mindless verbiage”), khaṭal (“excessive nonsense”), ikhlāʾ (“vacancy”), lakhā (“much ado about nothing”), ṭafānīn (“idle talk”), hadhayān (“senseless jabber”), thartharah (“chattering”), farfarah (“chittering”), ḥadhramah (“loquacity”), habramah (“garrulousness”), hathramah (“garrulity”), khazrabah (“rambling”), khaṭlabah (“ranting”), ghaydharah (“raving”), shamrajah (“blathering”), nafrajah (“blethering”), hamrajah (“blabbering”), thaghthaghah (“gabbling”), faqfaqah (“burbling”), laqlaqah (“clattering”), waqwaqah (“barking”), and hatmanah (“bombast”) — and in the ordinary speech of the common people, since it’s of no use to anyone, fashār (“bragging”) and ʿalk (“yakkety-yak”).