What Happened to Poetry?

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

The Spiritual Rumi Conferece, Freemont CA

In the name of Allah, The Merciful, The Compassionate.

I want to start off by saying that I know next to nothing about Jalaluddin ul

Rumi, so I’m not going to talk about Maulana Rumi. I’ve read his poetry in

translation, and the Mathnawi several years ago from Nicholson’s translation but

what I wanted to talk about was words, and in particular about poetry, which I do

know a little bit about. And the reason for that is two-fold: one, in terms of the

English language, I don’t know anybody that knows English poetry better than my

father does. He was somebody who, as far as I can tell, had a religious experience at

Columbia University taking classes with a man called Mark Van Doreni who was

also one of the teachers of John Berrymanii, who some of you might know, who was

an expert on Shakespeare.

Van Doren was a teacher of literature. He taught the great literature of

Western civilization and my father sat in his classes for three years at Columbia

University, and then audited his classes after he’d finished all the courses that he

could take with him. And I don’t think he ever said anything in any of his classes but

he, he told me many stories and actually he named me after Mark Van Doren, so that

tells you – I was his first born son – and I think that tells you the impact that this

man had on his life. But one of the things that he said about Van Doren that struck

him, as to his teaching technique, he said unlike the other professors at Columbia

University, who would always look at the masters with their critical eyes, Van Doren

was in awe of these great teachers and poets and writers of Western civilization and

he said that he had a deep humility in their presence. And he said that the other

thing, and Robert Girouxiii – some of you might know also, who was also a student

of Van Doren’s – he said Van Doren had a very clever technique in his class, and that

was that he would pretend that you were his intellectual peer or equal. And when I

mentioned that to my father, he said it’s not true. He didn’t pretend, he actually

really believed that. And that’s what was powerful about his teaching.

So, my father actually wrote a commentary on an Elizabethan treatise on

verse and so I grew up hearing – he memorized a lot of poetry – I grew up hearing

poetry, and also just hearing his discussions about these things, but I didn’t

appreciate any of it until I had a great teacher. And that occurred in the Middle East,

and he was from West Africa. And so it was very strange that this American young

man from the West Coast, who had a father who was immersed in great literature

and he’s one of the only people that I know, he actually read the 37 plays of

Shakespeare every year, like the Muslims do a khatam, and every time he would

finish, he would start over again. But I learned to appreciate poetry hearing West

Africans listen to poetry, recite poetry and be moved by poetry. And particularly,

their expressions when they heard a line, and this is called tarab. The Arabs call it

tarab and we get the word troubadour from that Arabic word. The troubadour is the

one that makes you delight in what he has to say or tell, his story, and the Arabs, if

they’re moved by poetry, they’re moved with this tarab. And the way the

Mauritanians, they’re very expressive because they’re literally – it’s almost like you

stab them. When they hear a really good line of poetry, they’ll say “Argh” like that,

literally, just like that. And they’ll make a move when they hear it, “Argh”. They’ll

literally make a move. [makes a stabbing motion at his heart] And initially, I thought

that this was kind of an affected type of thing, but after awhile I realized that it

wasn’t. It was that they really were being moved by the poetry. And that, obviously,

got me more and more interested in poetry. And it forced me, when I came back to

the States, to go back to my own tradition. So it’s funny – and by my own tradition, I

mean the civilization which I grew up in, which has a tradition of great poetry.

And one of the things about poetry, and I really believe that one of the

reasons that poetry is no longer taught, and if you’ve ever had a teacher that taught

you poetry in any real way, that would have been probably the most profound class

or experience that you had. But very few people are afforded that extraordinary

delight of having a great teacher. Most of us have to suffer the mediocrity of

passionless people teach words the emanated from the hearts of deeply passionate

people. Because what poetry is about is passion, and what’s forbidden in the modern

world is passion. It’s actually forbidden. You can’t be passionate about anything.

And woe unto you, if you’re passionate! And if you think what’s out there

mimicking passion has anything to do with real passion, then you’ve been

completely deluded. Really, completely deluded. And if you think that any of these

politicians that seem to be passionate about what they’re talking about – that is one

of the greatest examples of the lie and the mimicry of what passion is about.

One of the reasons that they don’t teach poets anymore is because poets aren’t

melodramatic. And in a world that you want people to think in melodramatic terms,

you don’t want them to understand the subtleties of the poet. And I’ll just give you

an example from Western tradition. In Homer’s The Iliad, you never know whether

Homer the Greek is on the side of the Greeks or the Trojans. You don’t know who’s

more noble, the Greeks or the Trojans. And he’s telling you something about most

wars that are fought between people. If you look at the wars that were fought

between the Muslims and the non-Muslims in that first part of Islam, the greatest

warriors of the Quraysh, men like Khalid ibn al-Walidiv, who fought against the

Prophet in so many battles, end up becoming one of the greatest warriors of Islam.

Because it’s not about this battle between black and white. It’s about the living

coming from the dead, and the dead coming from the living. In Homer’s Iliad, he has

Achilles, when his beloved is killed by Hector, and Achilles has a few flaws and one

of them is wrath – he gets angry very easily and he’s petulant. What Achilles does is

he goes and he kills Hector, and then he drags him around the tomb of his friend,

and then he leaves his body to be eaten by the dogs, which was a sacrilege to the

Greeks and the Trojans, something terrible – no respect for the dead. And one of the

things that Apollo says in a gathering – and Apollo was opposed to Achilles, he was

on the side of the Trojans – Apollo says, “Woe unto Achilles! Lest we become angry

at him, and he is a good man.” And what that tells you is that when you look at your

enemy, you have to be willing to admit that even your enemy has redeeming

qualities. Because if you’re not willing to admit that, then you’re stuck in this

mannequin duality of black versus white. And this is the melodrama of the modern

world: They’re evil, therefore we’re good. And the problem with that world view, like

an American poet who was more noted for her doggerels than for her poetry, but I

still like her, she’s Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She used to write a poem every day for one

of the newspapers in the 1880s. She said that the world’s divided into two people.

And it’s been said that the world is indeed divided into two people – one group are

the group that divide the world into two people, and the other group is all the rest.

So she said that the world is divided into two people, and she said – and I’m not

talking about the good and bad because the good are half bad and the bad are half

good. That’s the human condition.

So that’s one of the things that poets teach that they don’t want taught

anymore because it makes people have to actually think, and thinking is problematic

in a society where you don’t want people to think. So what happened to poetry?

That’s a good question, what happened to English poetry? One of the things about

the modern world is that they tell us that anybody can write poetry. This is what

you’ll learn in a creative writing class. That’s the biggest lie anybody ever told you.

You can just sit down and put down your thoughts and call that poetry. It’s not

poetry. Because this is another lie that this culture wants to teach – it’s that hard

things come easy. Fast food. Just go to Macdonald’s. You can be satiated. And if you

think that food satiates you, listen to your body after a few years of eating it. As the

heart begins to harden, literally and figuratively. It’s not just the literal hardening of

the arteries, arteriosclerosis, it’s a spiritual hardening of the heart, eating food that

has no blessing. Eating food that wasn’t made with the hands of a loving person who

actually cares for the people he or she is feeding. Food sacrificed to the altar of God.

There used to be something in this country they called soul food, right? Soul food.

That was the food that your mother cooked with love because it actually nourished

your soul. It wasn’t hamburgers made with beef that are fed other animals that give

them diseases like mad cow’s disease. It’s not Old Macdonald’s Farm anymore,

right? What happened to Old Macdonald? He became Macdonald’s and that’s part

of the problem. Really.

So this..what happened to poetry? Well, I’ll tell you what happened to poetry.

The Qur’an has a chapter called The Poets. Al Shu’ara. And there’s no chapter in The

Qur’an that isn’t named after something that is great. You will not find any chapter

in The Qur’an that is not named after something that has immense import. Whether

it’s The Spider, whether it’s The Cow, whether it’s The Bee, whether it’s The

Morning Sunlight, whether it’s The Moon, whether it’s The Moving Sand-dunes,

whether it’s Mutual Consultation, every word that is used as a title for one of the

chapters of The Qur’an has immense import in the lives of human beings. And one

of them is The Poets. But The Qur’an divides the poets into two types of people – the

poets who sell the gift that they have been given for the highest bidder. And this was

the jahili poet, he was called the sha-il. And what he would do is, if you paid him

enough money, he would say whatever you wanted to say with him, and when I

mentioned that to my father, about that, in The Qur’an, he said, “It reminds me of

Simonides that Aristotle mentioned”. He was a poet, a Greek poet, that used to sell

his ability to do verse to the highest bidder. And somebody once came to him and

asked him to write a poem about a donkey that he had particular love for. And it

bothered Simonides that he would have to write a poem about a donkey. But

because the man was paying him enough money, he wrote the poem and Socrates

quoted a couple of lines from it, “How beautiful thou art, thou storm-footed ass”.

So that’s one type of poet. And whether you realize it or not, he is now

disguised as an ad man. And The Qur’an says about these people, “The poets, they

follow them, those who are astray. Haven’t you seen them wandering in every

valley, saying with their mouths what they don’t do?” So I want to give you a couple

of examples of that. All I did, opened up a magazine today, didn’t even have to look

very far, just opened it up.

[shows ad] First ad:

Godiva chocolate will make her heart skip a beat. If she wins the ring, you may need to know

CPR. To be or not to be, that is the question.

Godiva chocolate will make her heart skip a beat. If she wins the ring, you may need to know

CPR.

[puts ad aside]

[shows second ad]

Next one:

One part protection, one part complexion. Whose words these are, I think I know. Whose

house is in the village, though? One part protection, one part complexion. Estratab, estrastep.

Your pill for more reasons than one.

[shows third ad]

Make your bones rock hard. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Creeps in this petty

pace of time from day to day. Make your bones rock hard.

[puts aside]

“Plop plop, fizz fizz. Oh, what a relief it is.”

The ancients would never do that! Even Simonides would not stoop that low.

And that’s the problem with our modern world. They don’t know what words are.

They don’t know the power of words, they don’t know who gave Man words. They

don’t know where they gave from.

Elizabeth Browning did. She gave one of the best descriptions of Jalaluddin

Rumi. She wasn’t talking about Rumi, but she was talking about a poet. He bore by

day, he bore by night, the pressure of God’s infinite on his finite soul. I mean, that’s the

poet. One part protection, one part complexion. Chiquita Banana. I’m Chiquita Banana and

I’m here to say, a banana’s gotta ripe in a particular way.

The Qur’an says about language: Arrahman alam Al Quran, khalaqal insan,

alamuhul bayyan. The Merciful, who has taught The Qur’an, created the human being

and taught the human being how to articulate his needs, how to speak what was in

his heart. Speak what was in his heart. Allamuhul bayyan. The word in Arabic, to

speak what’s in your heart, is yu’ribu. In fact, that’s what an Arab was, and that’s

why Herodotus said, of all people, the Arabs hated the lie more than anything else.

Herodotus said about the Arabs, “Of all people, the Arabs hated the lie more than

any other people.” Because they knew what words were. Words are meant to speak

the truth. That’s what words are for, and that’s what the other type of poet does – he

speaks the truth. And that’s a very difficult thing in the modern world, because like

Mark Twain said, only dead men can speak the truth.

Now, I want to just take a liar as an example here. This is a book called Why I

Am Not A Muslim. His name’s Ibn Warraq and it’s interesting, he says

Acknowledgements and the first thing he acknowledges, “I am not a scholar or a

specialist.” Well then, what are you doing writing a book about Islam? I mean, that’s

an interesting question to ask somebody who’s writing a book about Islam. But he

says here that there are three types of Islam: Islam 1 was what the Prophet taught.

Islam 2: what is expounded in the religion, interpreted and developed by

theologians through traditions. It includes shari’ah and Islam law. And Islam 3, what

Muslims actually did do and achieve, that is to say, Islamic civilization.

My general thesis emerges in this book is that Islam 3, i.e., Islamic civilization, often

reached magnificent heights despite Islam 1 and 2.

And here’s the example he gives. In the Mishkat of the Prophet Muhammad –

and this is revealing his ignorance because even though it’s in the Mishkat, the hadith

is from Sahih Bukhari and Muslim and it’s mutafa qalai, which means it’s agreed upon

and it has one of the highest authorities in Islam. The Prophet Muhammad is made

to say, “A belly full of purulent matter is better than a belly full of poetry”. That’s the

hadith, it’s actually a true hadith.

“Had the poets adhered to Islam 1 and 2, we certainly would not have had the

poems of Abu Nuwasv singing the praises of wine and the beautiful buttocks of

young boys.”

I mean, this is a very odd things for Ibn Warraq to be happy about – that

poems about the buttocks of beautiful young boys was preserved for postery,

because the hadith wasn’t followed. In this culture, they call it pedophilia, I think, if

you write poems about young boys’ buttocks, but that’s for the FBI to deal with in

Operation Candymanvi. Maybe Abu Nuwas would have been part of that sting

operation.

The interesting thing about that hadith is, what the Prophet was talking about

is these type characters – one part protection, one part complexion. And most of you,

unfortunately, have enough of these types of lines and many of you don’t even

know that they’re actually in metered verse. And if you go through a lot of these so-

called – I mean, this is just lousy, it’s not very well done. We’re changing the face of

security, protecting people, preserving privacy. I mean, that’s the poets that – it’s better

that you had your belly filled with puss than if you fill it with empty words. Right?

And if you just look – because the world is filled with poetry and people love poetry,

and that’s why pop songs are filling the air waves. It’s because people actually love

to hear metered words, they love to hear lyric verse. And so people listen to this

music, and they don’t think about what their minds are being filled with. They don’t

think about – we worry about pollution of the environment, but people don’t worry

about pollution of the mind, about what actually goes into your ears and enters into

your heart, because The Qur’an says,

Your ears, your eyes, your heart, these you have been made responsible for.

You’re actually responsible to protect your heart so that your soul doesn’t die.

Because one of the ways the soul is killed is by allowing things into the soul that

poison the soul. And one of the most powerful and toxic elements is words that are

not true. False words. And this is the poetry that the Prophet saw was warning

about. His wife Aisha memorized 12,000 lines of poetry from the poet Labid alone.

12,000 lines. The Prophet saw was once riding on a camel and he asked to hear some

lines of one of the jahaliyya poets who was a pre-Islamic poet whose poetry was filled

with wisdom. And the narrator says, “I mentioned a line and the Prophet said “Hee.

Let’s hear some more.” And I mentioned some more and he said, “Hee hee. Let’s

hear some more” until I mentioned a hundred lines of poetry.” The Prophet saw

used to have poets in his gatherings. His own Hassan ibn Thabitvii, who was one of

the great poets of that time, he said, “This man’s poetry is strengthened by the Holy

Spirit.” One time a man al-Aqra ibn Habisviii came to him, and he was from Bani

Tameem, who’s a nasty tribe, and he called from behind the Prophet’s house, he said

“O Muhammad! (saw) You better come out! Because I’m a poet and my praise is

good and my blame is bad.” And the Prophet saw said, “That’s God”. It’s not you,

that’s God. The one whose praise is good and whose blame is bad, that’s God. So he

said “Come out! Because we want to have a” – the Arabs had these kind of poetic

combat, where they would have one poet of one tribe get up and oppose a poet of

another tribe and this was a civilized way of fighting. And sometimes it led to

uncivilized ways of fighting. Because words meant something to those people. And

that’s part of the problem of modern peoples – words don’t mean anything anymore.

You can say anything, and you know – Dennis Millerix. I mean, these are the types of

people who can get out there and just say anything.

And part of this culture is that we’ve become such a shameless culture. And

one of the things about shamelessness, is that the root of shamelessness is shame.

And if you want that insight, you have to go to the great Russian poet. And he is a

poet, even though he wrote in prose. Dostoyevsky. Because in his Brothers

Karamazov, if anybody who’s read that remembers the meeting with the priest, who

is the mystic – and the father, he’s a debauchee, he’s always having orgies in his

houses and he’s a terrible man and he always behaves like a buffoon – shameless.

And he’s in the presence of this mystic, Father Zosima, and he begins to act like a

buffoon and Ilyusha, who’s trying to perfect his soul, is mortified and his other son

Ivan is mortified, and there’s a point where he says, “I’m so ashamed at behaving

like this”. And the priest says to him, “Don’t be ashamed because that’s the root of

the problem.” In other words, that’s why you’re so shameless. It’s because you’re so

filled with shame. And that’s what’s happened in this culture. This culture, we’ve

become such a shameless culture that we have to be shameless in order to deal with

the pain of being so shameless. And that’s something very difficult for us.

So those are the poets that the Prophet saw warned about, not poets who had

truth to say. So I want to look just at a few things, and then I’ll stop because it’s been

a long night. One of the things that Borges, who’s extraordinary – he wrote a

wonderful story about a meeting between Ibn Rush (Averroes) and several other

intellectuals. It’s a beautiful story. It’s a fictionalized account of something that could

have happened. And the beauty of the story for me, was that what Borges was trying

to do was trying to give us a glimpse of the exalted level of conversation that the

people of Andalusia had. And they’re discussing a line of poetry that comes out of

the Mu’allaqat, which is the, these are the great odes that the Arabs hung in the

Kaabah before Islam and they considered them to be testimony to the greatness of

the Arabic language. And they were, they were great, but many of them were filled

with meanings that Islam would radically transform. But they talk about this line of

poetry in which the poet says, Zuhair says

I saw death like the stumbling of a camel. The one that it hits, it destroys, and the one that it

misses lives a long life and grows old.

And they begin to argue about this line of poetry, and they say it’s a bad line because

fate is not like the stumbling of a camel. Fate is determined by God. And Ibn Rushd

or Averroes in the story says, “No you’re wrong. Because what the poet describes, is

he describes something we can all relate to and that’s what makes poetry great, it’s

that the poet speaks in a universal language.” And this is why Aristotle – and

Averroes is the greatest commentator of Aristotle – and so Borges knew that, and

Borges knew Aristotle very well. What Aristotle says is that poetry is greater than

history, because history deals with particulars but poetry deals with the universal.

And that is why, when the poet speaks, the poet impacts our hearts if he speaks the

truth. Because we recognize that truth in our hearts. And what Ibn Rushd says in

this story, is that the poet, when he – what he says is he says fate is not like a

stumbling camel, but he says, I see it like that. Ra’aytu. That’s what’s he’s describing.

And what he’s saying is that often, when we look at the world, we see chaos. It

doesn’t mean that it’s chaotic, but we often see only chaos. And that is what the poet

is saying. He’s describing something that human beings experience. And that’s why,

when we look at the world today, when we look at human beings, we can often

forget that there is an order in this universe.

When we look at Palestine right now and look at the madness that’s taking

place there in Palestine, it’s a meeting of two worlds. That’s all Palestine is. If you

want to understand Palestine, all you have to understand is that half of this planet,

half of this planet, lives on less than $2 a day. And we in the West consume 60% of

the world’s resources even though we are less than 10% the inhabitants of the planet.

And where do those two civilizations meet? They meet in Palestine. Because

Palestine is taking people from the West and planting them in the midst of a society

that has been too long exploited, and had its resources expropriated, lived under

despotism largely due to post-colonial traumatic syndrome. And most people are

too busy watching the important messages from our sponsors, to actually read a

book about the history of the Middle East, about colonialism. I mean, just read David

Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace. Most of the people are too busy to realize that

most of what’s going on in the West that’s troubling us is what they call “blowback”.

In CIA parlance, “blowback”, the unsuspected consequences or unforeseen

consequences of our own covert activities. That’s all there is. But people don’t want

that, that’s troublesome. We want to be in melodrama, remember? Us versus them.

Good versus evil. The evil empire. The Axis of Evil. These wonderful terms that

make life so easy. There’s all bad, remember? And we’re all good, thank God. Makes

it very easy, instead of having to deal with these ambiguities, which is what the

poets are trying to tell us. We’ve got problems. You have to think a little bit deeper.

So that’s what the poet has. He has a universal message. And that’s what

Rumi had, and I think that’s why Rumi.. Rumi strikes me as being popular for 2

reasons. One, he’s calling our bluff because everybody knows in our heart of hearts

that they’re going to die. And all he is is somebody who’s in the moment,

recognizing that death is imminent and the only important thing is the readiness.

And that’s something another great poet from the West said. If you look at the play

Hamlet, which really is a play about spiritual evolution – a lot of people don’t read

Shakespeare like that, but Shakespeare actually was working within deeply spiritual

motifs. And I’m just going to use 2 examples, and then I’m done.

One of them is the idea of purifying the soul. And Hamlet, if you remember in

the great soliloquy, when he says “To be or not to be”, what’s it about? It’s about fear

of death. That’s what it’s all about, it’s about fear of death. Because that’s part of

Hamlet’s dilemma, it’s this fear of his own mortality. But by the end of the play,

what’s happened to the man? He’s had a complete transformation, and when he’s

about to go into this duel, Horatio – they’re talking, and he hints to Horatio that even

though he feels he’s going to win the duel, he has this sense of his own death. And

Horatio’s worried about it, and he says, well, stop it for another time. And what does

Hamlet say? He says:

Not a wit. We defy augury.

Don’t stop it, we’re going to defy augury, in other words, having a bad omen. And

this is something the Prophet Muhammad saw taught. He said, if you have a bad

omen, do the thing anyway. Go against that thing in your soul. And then he

(Hamlet) says:

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

In other words, even God is aware of the fall of a sparrow. And there’s a providence

in that fall.

If it be now, tis not to come

If it be not to come, it will be now.

If it be not now, yet it will come.

He’s talking about death. It’s nothing you can stop. If it’s not meant to be now, it’s

coming later. If it’s coming later, it’s not meant to come now. And then he says, The

readiness is all.

That’s what life is about. It’s not trying to put off death. It’s being ready for death.

Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

If you can’t take anything with you, then why are you so worried about living this

long life? Because once death comes – and this is said by many many great people

before him and after him – Marcus Aurelius was one of them.

And finally, my favourite sonnet. And I’m sorry if you came to hear Rumi,

I’m quoting Shakespeare. [laughs] They call Shakespeare the Rumi – no, they call

Rumi the Shakespeare of the East, which is..that’s, that’s not..Shakespeare is

Shakespeare, Rumi is Rumi. So, don’t try to compare them. But this is a great sonnet,

it’s actually my favourite, but everybody’s..my father says his favourite’s the one he

happens to be reading at the time, so..

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

And that is a commentary on a hadith, that hell is surrounded by pleasurable

things and heaven is surrounded by displeasurable things. That’s all he’s saying, is

that you look at the enticements of this world, and you go after them without any

thinking, and as soon as you’ve got them, you realise the bitterness of their reality.

They didn’t get you what you wanted. And he says, we all know it, because we’ve

done it again and again and again, and yet we don’t know to shun the heaven that

leads to hell. In other words, these temporary pleasures that end up leading us to

something that’s frightening and this is one of the truths that the poet said, and the

Prophet saw said, “Surely, in poetry is great wisdom”. Ibn Hajjar r.a. says, “A true

word that is in accordance with the truth”. And the Prophet Muhammad saw said,

“The truest thing that a poet every said was what Labid said, ’Isn’t it that everything

other than God is falsehood?’” And that’s in Sahihh Bukhari. And that’s all Rumi ever

said. You can read all those lines – words, words, words – that’s all his message is.

It’s just a commentary on that one statement of the Prophet Muhammad saw.

Everything other than God is false, and if you realise that at the intellectual level, he

and every other scholar of Islam has been calling us to realise it at an experiential

level. And that’s the path of submission to Allah swt, which in Arabic is called Al-

Islam – submission to God.

And I’m going to finish with – aha I tricked you – I’m going to finish with a

poem by Jalaludin Rumi, which is translated by Coleman Barks - I like Coleman a

lot, but my friend Muhammad Isa Weli said “His translations are too roomy for me” –

R-O-O.

This is called “One Who Wraps Himself” and it’s a commentary on a

chapter in the Qur’an, Muzzammmil.

God called the Prophet Muhammad Muzzammil,

“The One Who Wraps Himself,”

and said,

“Come out from under your cloak, you so fond

Of concealment and fleeing

Because the Prophet saw loved to go off to the cave and meditate. And so he’s being

told now to come back.

Don’t cover your face.

The world is a reeling, drunken body, and you

are its intelligent head.

Don’t hide the candle

of your clarity. Stand up and burn

through the night, my prince.

Without your light

a great lion is held captive by a rabbit!

That’s what Odysseus in one of Shakespeare’s plays says to the Greeks. It is by our

weakness that Troy stands, not by their strength. And that’s the reality. It’s by the

weakness of the people of truth that the people of falsehood stand. Not by their

strength, because falsehood has no strength. But when the people of truth are weak,

then a rabbit can hold a lion captive.

Be the captain of the ship,

Mustafa, my chosen one,

my expert guide.

Look how the caravan of civilization

Has been ambushed.

Fools are everywhere in charge.

Guess not a lot has changed.

Do not practice solitude like Jesus. Be in

the assembly,

and take charge of it.

So you should live most naturally out in public

and be a communal teacher of souls.

Alhamdulillah. I thank my teachers for instilling in me a love of poetry that my father

tried to instill in me. And I thank all of you for bearing with me tonight, and being

very patient and polite.

ihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Van_Doren ii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman

iii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Giroux

iv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_ibn_al-Walid

vhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Nuwas

vihttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/kidporn.html

viihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_ibn_Thabit

viiihttp://www.muslimway.org/content/view/4908/38/

ixhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Miller