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| A good book makes you happy! Spotted in the library of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) |
Oh how I've wanted to find some time to write lately. And by "find time to write" I mean pack my bags and relocate to a sanitarium somewhere with lovely views and a great deal of quiet, unstructured time. Though preferably also with food.
That isn't happening.
Back in reality, Chris continues his apprenticeship at the butcher shop (as I write this, he is cooking us steaks for lunch, so much for environmentally-friendly eating) and I have joined Bring Women Back to Work, which might or might not eventually coax me back into the world of capitalism.
But more to the point of this post, I finished a book! By the German-Iranian writer and academic Navid Kermani. In English it's called Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer. I read it in German because I am trying to buy fewer books and that was the version I could get at the library. But I liked it so much that I'll probably buy it for myself and at least one friend, so that was maybe not the most successful strategy ever.
The book is Kermani's answer to a promise made to his late father, that he would pass the family's Islamic faith on to his daughter even as she grows up as a third-generation immigrant in a solidly German Catholic town. Very likely I was able to read it in the original German precisely because it's written for a 12-year old. But also, it's very very good. Religious education as I wish it were and it so often isn't: honest, generous, earnest, funny, absolutely not about telling us why the religious legacy he has to share is right or better but why he finds it helpful, beautiful, important.
I filled twelve pages with passages I wanted to save and it's hard to pick, but here's one for a flavor of the thing. All translations here are mine.
Because God - remember! - is just a word, an abstraction: "God" means the principle or the source of all life and therefore all love, because life comes from love - the love between man and woman, the love of sun and flower, the love between God and humanity, the love all over the animal kingdom between parent and child. God is precisely not the principle or the source of death and therefore hate, because hate does not create things, hate only breaks things. And when we humans have God's spirit in us, as the Bible and the Koran teach, the sprit of God and therefore the principle of life, then we are fulfilling our own godly nature when we love, instead of hate, and when we preserve the Earth and re-create her every day, instead of destroying her.
I'm reminded again of my philosophy professor's definition of philosophy as "that thing you almost thought yourself." In my wildest dreams these are the things I'd write about, this is what I'd teach. I struggle a lot with my own religious inheritance, and who knows what I've managed to pass on to my own children? But still, this is something I feel called to pursue. Lately I have the feeling of finding teachers - not so much officially, but at least in books - who can hold all my ambivalence and help me untangle the life-giving and transformative from the toxically positive and repressive. Rays of hope.
Here's how the book ends:
Do you know what my favorite word in the Koran is? The word "maybe." There is hardly a word that appears more often; you have heard it often in our evenings of religious education. In Arabic: la'alla. Maybe you will be thankful, maybe you will understand, maybe you will see, maybe you will come to your senses, maybe you will come back, maybe you will find mercy. In other words, there's always the possibility that you will not understand God or even that you will hate him, deny him. In this "maybe," though, there's even more. In this "maybe" lives the whole drama that is creation since the first cell division. You could have not been born. No one had to have been born. Your grandfather asked for a single word on his gravestone: schokr - thanks.
Which brings me to my next topic, gratefulness - not this moment (because if I don't press publish on this thing now there's a good chance I never will), but soon! I'll leave you with the story of the book's title, which I adore:
When Sheik Abu Saíd, one of the most famous Islamic mystics of the 11th century, came to Tus, a city in the northwestern part of today's Iran, so many believers streamed into the mosque to see him speak that there was no space left. "God forgive me," called the head usher, "everyone, wherever you are, come one step closer."
At this, the sheik closed the gathering before it had even begun. "Everything that I wanted to say and that all the prophets have taught, the usher already said," he said, by way of explanation, before he turned around to leave the city: "everyone, wherever they are, should come one step closer."
