Lenten Day 7: The Beauty of Questions – Giving up Easy Answers for Lent

I ran across this little book at the Eagle Harbor Book Store, where I will be reading from my new chap book tomorrow, Thursday, March 9th at 6:30. Please come!!! I’d love to see your face when I look up from my reading.

I am proud of the fact that there are several poems about admired Muslim heros I’ve met in the news, which brings me to … Letters to a Young Muslim. which you see pictured and I am in the process of reading . In this little book, Omar Said Ghobash encourages his sons and other young Muslims to use their intellect to ask important questions around today’s radicalism of Islam to help them embrace a moderate form of their faith.

I suspect the title is meant to make us recall the classic, Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainier Maria Rilke. That little powerhouse of a book has some of my all-time favorite lines such as “try to love the questions themselves…[] Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.” 1903.

It seems we are in a time when we need to be asking,loving and living some critically important questions around our diverse world. Intrigued by the author of Letters to a Young Muslim, I found online the text of a January interview by Terry Gross with Mr. Ghobash on Fresh Air, an NPR program that aired in January 2017. In the interview Ghobash said,

I am hoping to reach out to a bunch of young people who are idealistic, who have energy and who hopefully will be able to see that there is at least a certain kind of framework that they can either sort of use to think about or to build on or to completely scrap and build in a different manner.

I think that, for me, it is more important than any fear of radical Islamists taking action against me. For me, it's I suppose a cost benefit analysis. I think the world will be better off. I think Muslims will be better off. I think young people will have a better chance if they look at the world through a slightly different lens. And I hope to have provided at least some way towards doing that.

One of the best perks of teaching English as a Second Language for more than three decades was having had the chance to learn about other cultures through relationships rather than the hard lines of the news or political rhetoric. I cherish the laughter, the bright energy, and the passion I enjoyed in so many of my Arabic/Persian Muslim students. I long for these students, their families and indeed all of us to embrace with patience the questions that feel critically important in our diverse world today.

Here is a poem of a Muslim hero I met in the news…

A Pakistani Gravedigger

Don’t ask them at all about duty and obligation,

those for whom God has made love obligatory. Rahman Baba

Taj kneels at his worksite, the Rahman Baba Graveyard, named

for a Sufi poet- Pakistani, beloved, and wise. The worker weeps

on wreaths of chrysanthemums, piled on short mounds of rock.

As a professional rule, Taj never cries at work. He’s dug in heat,

hot as ovens, lowered all ages, height, and weight, but these,

the children of this school massacre weigh more than any in memory.

He cannot explain why he weeps, does not know his heart burns

in compassion, does not know he joins Rahman, who wrote