If, one day, the people will to live, then fate…
Quote
If, one day, the people will to live, then fate must answer.
The story behind this quote
This is the opening line of “The Will to Live”. Al-Shabbi proclaims that nothing can resist a people that wills to live; the next line adds that the night must lift and the chain must break. The poem then becomes a dialogue with nature: so the creatures spoke to me, says the poet, and their hidden spirit confided in me; whoever is not embraced by the longing for life evaporates into the air and vanishes. It also contains a line that became proverbial: whoever does not love climbing mountains will live forever among the pits.
Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi wrote the poem near the end of his short life, in Tunisia under the French protectorate; he died in 1934, at twenty-five. Some objected to the idea of a fate that must “answer”; others heard in it an echo of the Quranic verse saying that God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.
The first two lines became part of the Tunisian national anthem, “Humat al-Hima”, and were taken up in Tunisia and other Arab countries during the uprisings of 2010 and 2011.
Original text
إذا الشعب يومًا أراد الحياة، فلا بد أن يستجيب القدر.
The source
“The Will to Live” (Songs of Life), opening line, 1933
Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.
Author
Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi
Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, a Tunisian poet who died at twenty-five, wrote the Songs of Life, published after his death. His poem “The Will to Live” became an anthem of freedom across the Arab world.
Quotes by Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi