1.1.13
This now being known, I declare: the Fāriyāq was born with the misfortune of having misfortune in the ascendant everywhere, the Scorpion raising its tail to strike at the Kid, or Billy Goat, and the Crab set on a collision course with the horn of the Ox. His parents were people of notability, nobility, and righteousness (Bravo! Bravo!) but while their prospects for the world to come were expansive, their prospects in the world in which they lived were not with these co-extensive, and their reputations were, of their purse, the inverse (Boo! Boo!). The thunder of their names resounded far and wide, while the whirlwinds of their circumstance kicked up a cloud of praise as audible on plain as on mountainside, and so frequent were the visits of those seeking solace for their plight, so often did petitioners seek out their campfires by night, that the fountains of their income had run dry, the end of their bounty’s wellspring come nigh, and all that was left there was a little seepage from which the destitute and deprived might derive provision against want — and still they were generous with this to those who wanted for provisions (Boohoo!). Thus it was that they no longer found themselves with the means to send him to Kufa or Basra109 to learn the Arabic language, placing him instead with the teacher at the kuttāb of the village in which they dwelt (Alas! Alas!).
1.1.14
The teacher in question, like all other teachers of children in that country, had never in his life perused any book but that of the psalms, and it was that and that alone that the children studied there (Faugh! Faugh!) though to say they studied it doesn’t imply that they understood it. God forbid! Given its antiquity, it is no longer within anyone’s capacity to understand that book (Snore! Snore!), and the inaccuracy of its Arabic translation and the lameness of its language have made it yet more obscure and mysterious, to the point that it has almost come to consist of no more than word puzzles and riddles (Have at it! Have at it!), despite which, the tradition of the people of the country is to use it to train their children to read, without understanding what it means. Furthermore, in their opinion, it is forbidden to understand its meanings (For shame! For shame!) which makes one think that they don’t understand the meaning of the letters s-t-u-p-i-d,110 for example; neither, by the same token, do they understand the purely linguistic components of the book in question when they read it (Belly laugh!).
1.1.15
It seems that our masters, lords of the next world as of this, do not want their wretched subjects either to understand or to open their eyes but instead try as hard as they can to leave them wandering in the labyrinths of ignorance and stupidity (Barf! Barf!). If they wanted otherwise, they would bestir themselves to establish a printing press for them there111 to print useful books, whether written originally in Arabic or translated into it (Forward! Forward!). How, O mighty masters, can it please you that your abject slaves should raise their children in ignorance and confusion (Too bad! Too bad!) and their teachers not know Arabic or penmanship or arithmetic or history or geography or anything else of the things that a teacher ought to know? (So sad! So sad!) On how many of these children has the Almighty bestowed faculties of capacity and quickwittedness, despite which, for loss of the means to knowledge and lack of the instruments to discipline and raise them, the spark is so thoroughly extinguished in them when young that the tinder of achievement can no longer ignite it in them once grown (Ah! Ah!). What is more, you are, praise God, numbered among the well-heeled and wealthy, and it would not be beyond your means to spend a few purses on the construction of schools and the printing of useful books (Well? What about it?).
1.1.16
The income of the Maronite patriarch is of great weight and massive aggregate, so much so that with it he could bring life to the hearts of this desiccated sect of his that has lost any interest in competing with or challenging in any area those who, in earlier generations, attained to every science and virtue (On! On!) and whose only concern now is to learn a few rules of the Arabic and Syriac112 languages simply for the sake of knowing them and not for any benefit (Oh dear! Oh dear!). To date, not one of them has been known to have translated a book or beneficial pamphlet into either of these two languages, nor is the patriarch known to have ordered the printing of a language-teaching book in either (Tee hee! Tee hee!). If he were to spend half his annual income on acquiring the means to knowledge instead of on all those feasts and banquets that they put on for his visitors, or if each emir and noble shaykh were to make an annual gift of a certain amount toward this charitable end or were to send agents to the lands of the Franks to collect from the charitable there a sum that could be allocated to such things, everyone, east and west, would praise him for his deed (Hooray! Hooray!).
1.1.17
However, if one of our masters were to go to the trouble of sending Ḥanna or Mattā or Lūqā to his Frankish brethren113 to collect money, he would do so only for the building of a church or a hermitage (Ugh! Ugh!) overlooking the fact that, from birth to the age of twelve, no one can properly comprehend anything that comes to him from church or hermitage, though he can, during the same period, be learning useful things in a school or kuttāb (Blech! Blech!). Will you then, my masters, promise me to build libraries and print books, so that I don’t have to make this chapter too long for you?
1.1.18
My heart with rancor against you burns, while my breast with accusations against you churns (Ach! Ach!) because under your auspicious reign, my dear friend the Fāriyāq was unable to learn anything in his village other than the psalms, which is a book that they have stuffed with vulgar usages, mistakes, and lame language (Yech! Yech!) because its translator didn’t know chaste Arabic, and you can well imagine what the rest of the books printed in your country and in Great Rome are like (Retch! Retch!).
1.1.19
It is well known that, if error becomes rooted in the mind of the child, it grows up with him and is thereafter impossible to root out. Is there any other cause for this disgrace and shame than your neglect and mismanagement of civil and clerical affairs? (Ptui! Ptui!) Do you reckon lameness of language to be part of religion’s rites and lineaments, duties and requirements, or that chasteness of language will lead you to unbelief and heresy, reprehensible innovation and errancy? (Tut-tut!) Or did you reckon that those verses inastute might confound the learned Muslim in dispute? (Forget it! Forget it!) Is there no blood in your veins to rouse you to a love of eloquent, stately language, of rhetoric and fluency, of the arrangement of the words in accordance with set rules, of the expression of what passes through the mind without grammatically incorrect padding and boring interpolation, sickening complexity and phthisic expatiation? Without saying “et cetera” in mid-sentence or turning triliteral verbs into quadriliterals and vice versa,114 without using fī instead of bi- after a verb and the other way round,115 without making transitive verbs intransitive and the reverse, or the glottal stop into an elision and the contrary, or failing to distinguish between the active and the passive participles — for you say “They are envied of me” when you mean “are envious of me” and the like? (Ha-ha!) This book of mine is no Durrat al-thīn fī awhām al-qissīsīn (Prize Pearl of the Fishery concerning the Delusions of the Clerisy)116 that I have to include in it a mention of every one of your errors and delusions (My! My!). My intention is simply to use it to demonstrate to you that your brains have been fed with incorrect and lame language from the days when you went to the kuttāb and read the psalms there until you became grown, and then old, men (Hold your tongue! Hold your tongue!) and that if you remain in this state, no cure is to be hoped for (Woe! Woe!).