The Road Not Taken: Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini and His Chickens · 255to her: they do not exceed the usual in the lives of chickens.”^2 When I
visited Dr. al-Ḥusseini in 1979 at his home in Jerusalem for the interview
mentioned above, he took me to his backyard and showed me where the
chicken coop used to be. He repeated with much grace the same words
about the hen and told me that he used to feed his chickens every day by
himself and that he loved observing them for hours.
Toward the end of her story, the hen tells how suddenly, one day, a
family of outcast chickens was thrown inside their chicken coop. By that
time all the other adult chickens had been taken away from the place,
and there remained only the children of one of the hens, a young genera-
tion to which our narrator became spiritual mother and educator. The
heroine-hen tells of the opposition to these new invaders by the young
hotheads in the now-crowded chicken coop and of the frictions between
the two groups. “There is no space in our shelter for all of us,” says the
leader of the hotheads. “We have two options: either give up our shelter,
or else hold on to it and chase the foreigners out.” The youngsters quickly
decide on the second option, shouting, “This is the just way!”^3 The wise
hen describes how she came to the decision to settle things in peaceful
ways rather than by force. She then sends the youngsters away to preach
her message of peace and harmony to the world, and she stays with the
new arrivals, trying to create a life of peace and harmony.
The novella was seen by many as a parable of a solution to the greatest
problem that has beset the Middle East for decades and does not seem
to go away even now—the Arab-Israeli conflict. Al-Ḥusseini’s solution,
however, is “the road not taken,” neither by his fellow Palestinians, nor
by the Jews, nor, I fear, even by the author himself. Perhaps it was too
optimistic, perhaps too unlucky. The novella and the author, though,
received much attention. This should not come as a surprise, since Dr.
Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini was one of Jerusalem’s best-known intellectuals:
born in Jerusalem in 1903 or 1904 to the established and respected fam-
ily of al-Ḥusseini, one of the ruling elite of the Arabs in Palestine at the
time, he received his primary and secondary education in Palestine and
continued to his higher education in Egypt, where he came under the
influence of the great intellectual leaders of the era, such as Ṭāhā Ḥussein
(Ḥusayn), Manṣūr Fahmī, and Aḥmad Zakī.^4 He completed his academic
studies in London, where he received in 1934 a doctoral degree in the
School of Oriental Studies at London University under Professor H.A.R.
Gibb.