Excerpts from "The Road to Mecca"

Arabian Wisdom

"Coffee, in order to be good, must be bitter like death and hot like love."

"If water stands motionless in a pool, it grows stale and muddy; but when it moves and flows, it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings."

"You traveller, he traveller; your way and his way is together."




"We Arabs .... we want to commit our errors ourselves and so learn how to avoid them - just as a tree learns how to grow right by growing, or as running water finds its proper course by flowing."

"We do not want to be guided to wisdom by people who have no wisdom themselves - who have only power, guns and money, and only know how to lose friends whom they could so easily keep as friends..."





A Jew against Zionism
"It was not without a purpose that God made us lose our land and dispersed us; but the Zionists do not want to admit this to themselves. They suffer from the same spiritual blindness that cause our downfall. The two thousand years of Jewish exile and unhappiness have taught them nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness, they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a "national home" on foundations provided by Western power politics; and in the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of its home."

2 retired Jewish couples whom we befriended in Rome
(originally European and Indian respectively)

The Chant of the Mu'azzin
"... made me realize in those days at Cairo how deep was the inner unity of all Muslims, and how artificial and insignificant were the dividing lines between them. They were one in their way of thinking and judging between right and wrong, and one in their perception of what constitutes the good life."


Prayer
"I became aware how near their God and their faith were to these people. Their prayer did not seem to be divorced from their working day; it was part of it - not meant to help them forget life, but to remember it better by remembering God."




Spiritual Development
"The Quran never let its followers forget that the life of this world was only one stage of man's way to a higher existence, and that his ultimate goal was of a spiritual nature. Material prosperity, it said, is desirable but not an end in itself: and therefore man's appetites, though justified in themselves, must be restrained and controlled by moral consciousness. This consciousness ought to relate not merely to man's relation with God but also to his relations with men; not only to the spiritual perfection of the individual but also to the creation of such social conditions as might be conducive to the spiritual development of all, so that all might live in fullness..."




Dedicated to mamasita