Re-awakening

Got a phone-call from friend Tony (Jamal) Green the other day. As a result of last year's move from the Mansion and new e-mail addresses and the like, I'd foolishly lost touch with him, so it was a most welcome call. We're intending to get together to mull over a cuppa and have a bit of a chin-wag soon, but prior to our meeting Tony asked me to cast my eyes over a manuscript of a book he'd written, if I could afford the time. I readily agreed, this being a particularly good time to allow my reading to be hijacked in a good cause, and suspecting that whatever Tony had come up with was likely to be of more than a little interest. He filled me in with a bit of background on his having tried to put together something for a Western readership related to his experience of Islam in an attempt to find ideas worth sharing, as it were, between the worlds we both, to some degree, straddle.

The manuscript arrived yesterday and I'm already two-thirds of the way through, simply because I can't put it down. It really is that good. Of course, I'm as far away from being an unbiased judge in this regard as you can get, but with whatever objectivity I can muster on something so close to my heart I'll just say I can conceive of this really selling, and, more importantly, really spreading light where light is desperately needed.

Essentially Finding Common Ground (working title only, and one of two at that) reads something like the kind of thing you'd find on the Self Help shelves, but it draws on what is best in that kind of writing and uses it to the noblest end I can think of. I found myself more than once thinking, yes, that's exactly it, that's exactly what I would like to have said, that's what needs to be said - and aware that it was being said in the best possible way, the way of utter sincerity.

Most of all, Tony's writing made me think - think about my faith and the actions, and lack of actions, resulting thereof. Painful. Necessary.