Ameen Rihani

“ Their ashes out, up and into mine eyes, alas! the awful reaping.
No longer do I fear,
Nor see, nor feel, nor hear;
No longer am I near;
If thou wilt quench thy flame, kiss now the lips that were to thee so dear.
As well kiss thou the grass
On which I lay, alas!
Like me, thou too wilt pass;
One kiss will turn thy lips to ashes and one tear, thine eyes to glass.
Beneath this hemlock tree
A clod I leave to thee;
But over land and sea
My soul is rising, rising, rising, searching for the gods that be.
But gods have lived, and lied,
And loved, and fell, and died ”

“ Without it, no victory is complete. Towards Mecca, therefore, commanded by Abu Taher, the Karmathians swept over the desert. And like swarms of locusts, wave after wave, they descended upon the City at the height of the pilgrimage season and committed, in the name of Allah, the most unspeakable crimes and abominations. Thirty thousand of the pilgrims were slain; the well of Zamzam was choked with the dead; the House of God, the Kaaba, was polluted; the Holy Veil was torn in shreds; and the Black Stone, the most sacred relic of Islam, was carried off to Hasa. ”

“ He quoted from the Luzumiyat to show that the poet-philosopher of Ma'arrah was a true Sufi, and of the highest order. "In his passionate hatred of the vile world and all the vile material manifestations of life," quoth our host, "he was like a dervish dancing in sheer bewilderment; a holy man, indeed, melting in tears before the distorted image of Divinity. In his aloofness, as in the purity of his spirit, the ecstatic negations of Abu'l-Ala can only be translated in terms of the Sufi's creed. ”

“ For what proof have we, it is often asked nowadays, of the existence of the soul and of the necessity, in consequence, of a soul-ideal? I go neither to metaphysics nor to spiritualism for an answer. To those who deny its existence, who make light of the innate divine flame in man, who can not see anything outside of matter, or anything but matter in matter, to these materialists I offer the perfume of the rose, the light of the sun, the emanation of a firefly, the aura of a planet, to say nothing of the human understanding. ”

“ Makes of thine amber locks a golden wreath.
Life flutters in thy hair as in mine eyes;
Death can not choke the breeze that whispers there
A word of hope; beneath my breath will rise
A hair with God eternity to share
The noon and eve of Life thou didst not see,
But in its Dawn thou didst anticipate
What jealous Night would not permit to be,
What pain and suffering never could abate.
Shall I strew on thee faded blossoms, Brother,
Or fiery buds consumed by their own flame,
Or myrrh and myrtle from our Mountain-mother,
Or golden rods that whispered oft thy name? ”

“ But to build it on a political fiction is as bad as building it on a religious chimera. For whether as an instrument in the hands of a government or in the hands of a spiritual hierarchy, man is equally a slave. Indeed, the 'part-of-the-whole' idea, when announced and accepted as a dogma or a law, is a libel upon humankind, an insult to its innate nobility. No, the individual is not a means to an end.
What avails it to know that I am free, if I can not realize this freedom in a definite, specific existence? ”

“ But whether of dust or fire or foam, the glaive
Of Allah cleaves the planet and the wave
Of this mysterious Heaven-Sea of life,
And lo! we have the Cradle of the Grave.
X
The Grave and Cradle, the untiring twain.
Who in the markets of this narrow lane
Bordered of darkness, ever give and take
In equal measure—what's the loss or gain?
XI
Ay, like the circles which the sun doth spin
Of gossamer, we end as we begin;
Our feet are on the heads of those that pass,
But ever their Graves around our Cradles grin. ”

“ And no matter how ambitious and sincere, or how selfish and unscrupulous are the leaders of the movements that embody this theory, no matter how ruthless and uncompromising are the apostles of equality and violence, the nation they overturn soon or late finds its balance again and, through the agencies of law and order, reestablishes on a higher plane the principles of justice and progress.
For, as a rule, a nation emerges stronger, morally and spiritually, from a revolutionary upheaval. ”

“ No Labor Union can guide him; no Government can deter him. He is a fatality. Spiritually deformed himself, he comes, paradoxical as it may seem, to restore the world to its spiritual ideals. The religion that was given him as a consolation, he rejects; the faith that was perverted to keep him in bondage, to reconcile him to his gilded fetters, he renounces forever. But he will swing back with his masters from the height of a bloody crisis to the highest ideal—to a spirituality that is the common heritage and the cherished treasure of the rich and the poor. ”

“ Sparks of the log of evil are all men
Allwhere—extinguished be the race entire!
CVIII
If miracles were wrought in ancient years,
Why not to-day, O Heaven-cradled seers?
The highway's strewn with dead, the lepers weep,
If ye but knew,—if ye but saw their tears!
CIX
Fan thou a lisping fire and it will leap
In flames, but dost thou fan an ashy heap?
They would respond, indeed, whom thou dost call,
Were they not dead, alas! or dead asleep.
CX
The way of vice is open as the sky. ”

“ The machine there is fast replacing the dexterous hands of the artisan; the atelier is being transformed into a factory; the merchant is usurping the place of the man of talent; the quaint bazaar is becoming a market-place of brummagem; the mould is destroying the spirit of invention; and uniformity will ultimately banish the creative genius of the race. It would be a pity, a calamity, indeed, if the soul of the Oriental, which he puts into his work, were to be destroyed by the hustling, strenuous, money-making spirit of the present day West. ”

“ Do what they deem is wrong, and go thy way."
LXXIX
Thy way unto the Sun the spaces through
Where king Orion's black-eyed huris slew
The Mother of Night to guide the Wings that bear
The flame divine hid in a drop of dew.
LXXX
Hear ye who in the dust of ages creep.
And in the halls of wicked masters sleep:—
Arise! and out of this wan weariness
Where Allah's laughter makes the Devil weep.
LXXXI
Arise! for lo! the Laughter and the Weeping
Reveal the Weapon which the Master 's keeping
Above your heads; Oh! take it up and strike!
The lion of tyranny is only sleeping. ”

“ Like the Ujigami of Japan, we all have our distinct deities, which we invest with our own personality. In this sense, we are all self-worshippers: the gods of our allegiance, our devotion, are the gods of our pride. Else why should we be so attached to the soil, the plants, the flowers, the cliffs of our native land? There is something even in a familiar fern that leaves in the soul the impress of its own locality.
In my own country the flowers are the toys of our childhood; they are nature's precious presents, which she never fails to bring us on every holiday. ”

“ To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius. And this can only be done through the magnifying and intensifying process. Even the eye of the soul can not always see the subtleties that conceal a world of beauty and charm. So the medium of genius, which stands between us and Nature, is necessarily complex, and is endowed moreover with an intense passion. ”

“ Some people among us will find these between the curse and the blessing. I, for one, refuse to peep with the radical reformer into the boudoir of the Trust; and I admire her not, as do the aladinists of Damascus, in her travelling toggery. But in her workaday clothes I behold her walking with the people, and I dare say she is tolerably human.
For in spite of what is set down in the Criminal Code, I am convinced that the Trust hath a soul. Else how could she be so fair and so wicked, so voracious withal and so bounteous? Indeed, the soul of the Trust is accumulative, even like her capital. ”

“ For though the mosque be in the tinkers' bazaar seldom a sound from the outer world reaches even its court or violates its hallowed silence. And in this vastness of spiritual repose the soul may loaf and invite the body, and the mind may doze and invite the soul. Without cymbals and bells, without organ and choir, without icons and statues, but with the lamps of faith and devotion ever burning, the soul is left to itself to find its way through an infinity of unworldly calm and silence to the divine infinities of the One Supreme—Allah. ”

“ For we all find some one below us or above us—in most cases below and above us—to afford us a satisfaction and an incentive—to make the arduous ascent a pleasant jaunt. If the working man and the labor leader, the capitalist and the politician all recognized this truth and espoused the ideal it connotes, the social and industrial problems of the times would not seem so hopelessly insoluble, without general strikes and revolutions. For legislation alone is, after all, only a form of compulsion. And a man without a spiritual ideal will obey the law when he can't help it and break it when he can. ”

“ Winter, for instance, has as much respect for the calendar as the moon; he never makes his appearance before Autumn folds his tent and silently steals away. Nor is Autumn so selfish and inconsiderate as to remain in the lap of Nature, when Winter's steps are heard behind the gate of Mt. Sanneen. Spring is never shy and coquettish in taking up the cue. We do not have to go a-searching for her when the time comes as we often do in other parts of the world, especially in and around New York.
My native horizon is not very far away, O my Brother of Manhattan, and not as alien as it seems. ”

“ OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE
OF all the places of worship I know,—and I have lugged my unshrived soul and my weary limbs into many a foreign temple,—the mosque has always impressed me as being by far the most democratic and the most unstinted in its varied hospitalities. There is nothing in it or in its economy to flatter the rich, or oft end the poor, to repel the weary, or distract the devout. The welcome it extends is not of the two-by-two pew order; the solace it affords is no bread-and-cheese affair. ”