264 · Hanita Brand
an abrupt move away from one era, and one style of writing, to another
era, with its own new style. The move away was from a religious Roman-
tic style of writing that was influenced by the theosophical teachings that
suffused Arab Romanticism, particularly its poetry. The greatest repre-
sentatives of this kind of writing were the poets and philosophers Jubrān
Khalīl Jubrān and Mikhā ̓īl Nu ̔ayma. As is the case with all Romantic
literature, theirs too had great respect for nature in its two meanings, both
the nature we see outside around us, and our inner makeup—our innate
character. But what was particular to their special brand of Romanticism
was its unique religious Weltanschauung, which gave it its theosophical
nature. Within it all monotheistic religions were welcome, and ideals of
communality and equality were married to a universal religious belief in
which there prevailed a message of tolerance and forgiveness. If George
Kanazi were to include and apply in his otherwise thorough analysis of
the work its particular religious theosophical worldview, the ideal char-
acter proposed by the hen, which he summarized in his research, would
faithfully represent this Arab theosophical Romanticism. Quite a few
Arab writers, including Palestinians, wrote in that vein up to the 1940s.
But around that time, due to the escalating conflict in Palestine among
other reasons, there was an abrupt move away from it into a message of
vengeance and violence, particularly in Palestinian writings.
I have written elsewhere about another Palestinian writer, a Chris-
tian poetess whose work underwent just such a change: Najwā Qa ̔wār
Farah.^27 Up to the 1940s she wrote mostly Romantic poetry of the kind de-
scribed above. Then she turned to writing Palestinian nationalist stories.
In one of her stories, “Nidā ̓ al-aṭlāl” (The Call of the Ruins), published in
a collection in 1956, a Palestinian father, who becomes a refugee after the
creation of the state of Israel in 1948, bequeaths to his son a handwritten
message of tolerance, punctuated by such phrases as “it is better for us
to suffer wrong than to cause wrong, for the evil deed is foul,” and lay-
ing the blame for the Palestinian Nakba (calamity) on the human heart,
rather than on “the British, the Arab leaders, or the Jewish leaders.”^28 As
was noted by Avrhahm Yinon, who translated this story into Hebrew,
after the book was printed, the publisher decided to change some of the
original lines of the father’s speech in which he spoke of mutual tolerance
based on righteousness and mercy. A revision was pasted into each copy,
on which were written new lines calling for vengeance, including such