"The Global Soul" is what I read when I want myself explained. My copy of it is underlined to hell and back, and I read him for the kind of catharsis one usually feels when listening to angsty rock bands while wailing "only THEY understand how I feeeeeeel".
"Abandon" and "The Lady and the Monk" on the other hand are fiction. The latter is a deft and nuanced explication of cross-cultural romance. The former is about Castiel:
"All religious verse speaks to us in a language we can understand. To those with the eyes and ears the poems are a kind of holy come-on; to those without, they appear as love songs, emblems of profanity."
"You do not come to the Sufi way through your mind. The mind is a knife, useful only for cutting apart. You do not come to our path through your heart. The heart is a shield, for defending yourself against truth. You come to it through grief. Through the shock that breaks you open. In your tradition, you speak of loving the one who is the source of all your joy. In ours, we speak of loving the one who is the cause of all our sorrow. Our word for this is bala. Bala in our language means 'affliction'. Bala also means 'yes'."
Actually it's just about some sad guy and a sad girl falling in and out of love, but the numerous excerpts from the sad guy's thesis, articles, and academic presentations about Sufism are TO DIE FOR. To diiiiiieeee for, omg.
no subject
"Abandon" and "The Lady and the Monk" on the other hand are fiction. The latter is a deft and nuanced explication of cross-cultural romance. The former is about Castiel:
"All religious verse speaks to us in a language we can understand. To those with the eyes and ears the poems are a kind of holy come-on; to those without, they appear as love songs, emblems of profanity."
"You do not come to the Sufi way through your mind. The mind is a knife, useful only for cutting apart. You do not come to our path through your heart. The heart is a shield, for defending yourself against truth. You come to it through grief. Through the shock that breaks you open. In your tradition, you speak of loving the one who is the source of all your joy. In ours, we speak of loving the one who is the cause of all our sorrow. Our word for this is bala. Bala in our language means 'affliction'. Bala also means 'yes'."
Actually it's just about some sad guy and a sad girl falling in and out of love, but the numerous excerpts from the sad guy's thesis, articles, and academic presentations about Sufism are TO DIE FOR. To diiiiiieeee for, omg.