Bookish

8 Ramadhan 1430

0840

I'm off to do a workshop for gifted kids who are interested in Literature, I think aged 15 - 16, at a different school from my usual. Did something similar this time last year and got a heap of book tokens for my trouble and, it seems, will receive the same today. Intending to share them with Fifi (who says she doesn't have time to read) and Fafa.

The preparation has involved dipping into Lawrence's Collected Poems and Hughes's Collected Poems For Children, a highly satisfactory way to spend one's time.

13.50

Now back from my workshop having had a thoroughly good time. When work isn't work it can be very pleasant indeed. One of the kids pointed out something about the end of one of Hughes's poems on weasels I'd not noticed before. A little bit more light entered the world.

Is there another body of work in English to equal the sheer verve, variety and charm of Hughes's animal poems, especially those written overtly for children?

17.35

Reading the poetry mentioned above has been a delightful diversion from my main, Islamic-themed reading of the month. I'm now just over half-way through The Holy Qur'an in Abdullah Yusuf Ali's version. In this quick reading I'm getting a sense of the overwhelming, relentless, pounding power of the scripture. I suppose I'd say a sense of its momentum, except that it has none, being essentially meditative, unmoving. It leads nowhere save to itself, yet again. Repetition is not so much a device as an essential, yet in subtle ways it doesn't quite repeat. New contexts give lines new shades of meaning. Abdullah Yusuf Ali's notes are extraordinarily useful in this respect. He picks up beautifully on new contexts.

The other book I've got going, now about two-thirds of the way through, is Annemarie Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam and I must say I can't praise it too highly. This one delivers in every way. It's comprehensive and scholarly without getting bogged down in its topic. The clarity and straightforwardness of the writing is exemplary. When she's enthusiastic over a certain character or idea she says so; when she has her doubts, which you sense are well-founded, then you get them. She celebrates, she criticises - with enough of the original sources usually to put the reader in a reasonable position to decide for themselves.

I've just finished the chapter on the Sufi brotherhoods and this is a good example of her sense of balance. It's touchingly sympathetic at the beginning, especially when she's looking at how fundamental the idea of simply helping others, being in community, putting their interests before your own has been in Sufi thought - not necessarily the most obvious development of a mystical view of things. Yet there's plenty of assured criticism of the degree of corruption, sometimes simply financial, that has bedeviled some of the Sufi orders over the centuries.