ابنوا المدارس واستقصوا بها الأملا

Build schools and pour your utmost hopes into them, until we rival Saturn in the height of our buildings.

Lavish upon them whatever your earnings yield, and meet with utter contempt anyone who withholds his wealth.

If ignorance is the disease behind our conditions, then knowledge is the medicine that heals those ailments.

March toward knowledge within them with the resolve of the determined, and ride the night like a camel to achieve it.

Do not let mere scholarship be your only goal inside them, rather teach the youth a science that gives birth to action.

These schools of yours are like your farces; so plant within their soil whatever is high and precious.

Do not let weeds grow in their planting grounds—by which I mean whims and partisan sects.

And found them upon concrete deeds, paving smooth pathways for life through them.

Let the youth find within them a testing ground for deeds, and a washing place for the soul's impurities.

Shower their meadows with knowledge and capability, until their blossoms cause hopes to open wide.

They will nurture the artistic scholar and inventor, and bring forth the fearless knight and the champion.

They will nurture the toiling farmer at his plow, and raise the eloquent, quick-witted orator who speaks without notes.

Give the student inside them cups of noble wine to drink, which will make him forsake the wine of the tavern altogether.

Until their graduate walks proudly intoxicated with self-respect, outshining the swagger of the tavern's drunkard.

Alongside instruction, raise the children with a training that turns the morally deficient into a complete human being.

Refine them with practical drill and clear insight—a culture that makes the crooked grow straight.

Keep them far away from punishment as a method of action, for if you repeat punishment, it becomes lethal.

Punishment only increases the soul's malice, and none but the ignorant would ever deny this truth.

Instead, raise the rising generation while they are naturally molded in their very lives to love virtue.

So that if a shameful blemish from his own action touches him, his face will turn red with pure embarrassment.

Whoever abandons evil merely from the fear of punishment is not reckoned virtuous, even if he avoids the sin.

Mobilize an immense army of science from our youth—a vast host whose example the whole world will cite.

If it rises for agriculture, it returns the earth lush and fertile; if it rises for war, it crushes plain and mountain alike.

And if it raids under the shade of its banner, it shakes nations awake and brings back the primal centuries of glory.

We belong to a nation that, in the era of its awakening, once forged mighty states through knowledge and the sword.

This is true knowledge, not what you slave away for, which ultimately leads your outcomes straight to failure.

What do you say to my critique of your curricula, when I have already spared you long elaborations and wordy praise?

And what earthly use is it for anyone who enters your schools, if he leaves them exactly as he was when he walked in?

So pool your opinions regarding what you educate with, and then act with a restless energy that knows no boredom.

Then blaze a single trail across all Arab lands—a path firmly grounded in the unity of education.

Until whenever we summon all Arabs everywhere, it is as though we have called upon a single man.