He hugged us and said, “Thanks are never given to one’s brothers.”Īs we pulled away, tears streamed down Ihsan’s face. While with Ihsan, we were not to pay for anything.Īs the train pulled in, we said thank you. His friends joined us at the station, tickets in hand. He told our story as if he was the one travelling. He beamed with pride – feeling at once part of our quest.Īs we walked back into town to catch the only train of the day, he stopped to introduce us at the local cafe. Through an elaborate mix of drawing pictures and broken Turkish we told him we were on a journey to visit the great shrines of the East. It turned out Ihsan’s job at the mosque was unpaid – an act of love. I’ll never know how he told his wife we were coming, but we arrived to a feast: steaming cabbage rolls, fragrant lamb stew and white rice, along with dripping honeycombs, and fresh cherry juice. Soon we were marching through pitch dark fields to his home for dinner. We could hardly speak Turkish, but the language of the backpacker is universal. His name was Ihsan and we later learnt he was also the cleaner, the handyman and the one with the keys. We found just three – including the Imam. We said a prayer.Īfterwards, we entered the adjacent mosque for evening prayers expecting many congregants. A lone passerby pointed us down a long road leading to a deserted tomb. We arrived in the town bearing the poet’s name just before dusk.

Instead of the standard accounts of Islam emphasizing ‘extremists,’ ‘traditionalists. But its main purpose is to shed light on Shari’a, a highly politicized concern of our times. Our destination was the tomb of Yunus Emre, a 13th century mystic whose poetry, written in simple language, could be understood by peasants and paupers. This book offers a long-overdue intellectual biography of the late Egyptian Shaykh Mohammed al-Ghazali (d.1996). In Islamic tradition, they are called the friends of God – who through rigorous piety and service to others have achieved such closeness to God that they become spiritual guides. My friend and I were on our way to see a saint. They were locked in the luggage hold of a rickety old bus winding its way through the hilly Anatolian countryside. Play Audio: Pause for Thought from journalist Abdul Rehman Malik – BBC Radio Click on these beautiful images & start exploring the theme/value behind it.Pause For Thought from journalist Abdul-Rehman Malik

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Photos al ghazali