JANUARY 27 Thoughts of an American Muslim

JANUARY 27 Thoughts of an American Muslim Three years ago David Miller embraced Islam and became Yousaf Omar. This transition had a great deal to do with his disillusionment from his society. Here he reflects on the nature of American culture through the worldview that has transformed him. Whenever I think about myself living in the United States these days, two stories come to mind. The first is from Maulana Rumi and the other, although a joke, is very revealing of the viewpoint that prevails here. In the first book of the Mathanavi, Rumi tells a story of a man who lived in a desert and who, urged on by his wife, agreed to take an offering to the King in the city. The offering was a pitcher of rain water, which the man and his wife had laboriously collected. They considered this water precious because it was sweet compared to the brackish water of their well, their only major source. Meagre though the offering was, the King received it in the spirit in which it was offered and, emptying the pitcher, filled it with gold. The King also arranged for the man to return to his home on a boat. Seeing the vastness of the river on which he travelled, the man marvelled at all the water the King had at his command and at the way he took the poor man’s meagre offering and rewarded him. It is one of Rumi’s renditions of the Islamic ethos. In fact, it is so rich in implications that Rumi himself narrated it with more than the usual splendid digressions which enrich his work. The King, Maulana makes clear, is God and His bounty is as boundless as all the water on earth. What enchanted the story was the understanding that prevailed throughout, an understanding of an Islamic umma, of compassion, of knowledge of the world, of tolerance and of the recognition of the different kinds of people which constitute the Muslim world. I must admit, however, to one question which continued to bother me until most recently. Was Rumi’s society an ideal or did it really exist? Then, a couple of weeks back, I read in a special travel supplement to The New York Times of an American author, Annie Dillard, giving a short description of her ‘sojourn’ in North Yemen. She was there during an earthquake and she