I am, of course, as keen to discover what lies behind the mysterious mistreatment of the two black dogs in the house of the three beautiful sisters as Harun al-Rashid himself, Commander of the Faithful, Caliph of Baghdad (I’ll spare you all his other honorifics), to whom the mistress of the house is now relating her own amazing story (which, of course, deserves to be written with needles, etc, etc).
But we don’t get all the way to the bottom of that on this seventeenth night and meanwhile my attention has been caught by one tiny detail in the lovely lady’s account of her visit to the city resembling a dove. All the citizens and rulers of that marvellous city have been turned to black stone. Except one. She encounters him at prayer in the middle of the night, reading from the Holy Quran on his prayer rug by the light of two lamps and two candles. And before he begins to tell her how the city met its fate, he
closed the Quran, and put it into a bag of satin
and at once I remembered Brother Daniel and the holy books.
Brother Daniel celebrating his retirement in typical fashion
I only met Brother Daniel Faivre once, but he’s not the sort of man you forget, with his large bushy white beard, ineradicable French mannerisms and extraordinary enthusiasm and skill for bringing unlikely people together and making them work at understanding each other. He was the inspirational founder of Westminster InterFaith, an agency of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster with the specific task of fostering understanding between different faiths in the diocese.
That night, he was visiting a small parish caring for the souls of Roman Catholics in an unglamorous ethnically diverse part of West London, and he had come to talk about Muslims and Islam. The people listening to him had mostly never given much thought to Muslims or Islam. Why should they? It’s hard enough work just focusing on how to be a good Catholic.
Brother Daniel arrived with a pile of small pink and green cloths patterned with golden flowers and proceeded to give one to every person present. Christians revere the Bible, he told us, and Muslims the Quran. But Muslims also honour the actual physical copy of the Quran that they keep in their own homes, and wrap it in a beautiful silken cloth when it is not being used. The cloths he brought to us were a gift from his friends at the mosque near where he lived, given that we might use them to honour our own holy books.
Here you see two of my personal ‘holy’ books resting on the pink cloth Brother Daniel gave me. One is my Jerusalem Bible (this edition). It got quite battered over the years and I have had it rebound. I love it and would not willingly part with it, though my views on the significance of its contents have changed immeasurably since I was given it as a teenager. Many passages are underlined with red ink. When I look at them now, some still speak very powerfully to me. Others have become opaque. Why did I underline them? When and how did the meaning I drew from them change?
The other is my aunt’s commonplace book, page after page of her awkwardly angular script pinning down the thoughts of many spiritual and philosophical writers. On this page she has written out an extract of a commentary on Montaigne (unfortunately she doesn’t indicate who the commentator is):
Like Socrates, Montaigne was as ignorant as other men save in his knowledge of his own ignorance: but being Montaigne he gives the famous saying a turn of his own. “Je me tiens de la commune sorte, sauf en ce que je m’en tiens”; “I am an ordinary man, except that I know it”. The lingering trace of Socrates’ intellectualism departs. Montaigne, to himself, is simply a man who knows it.
My aunt was a nun, a holy, erudite, literary woman and a great educator. I remember her telling me about the social, political and economic discrimination against Catholics in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century that had led to the establishment of specifically Catholic schools and colleges to ensure that Catholic children could get a decent education. She did not think segregation was a good thing – more an unfortunate necessity, because of bigotry. Her mother, my own grandmother, was disowned by her Presbyterian family when she married my Catholic grandfather. And this was among people who professed to share the same faith.
My aunt would have liked Brother Daniel too.
I don’t remember precisely what else Brother Daniel told us about Islam that night, but I remember very clearly what he had to say about interfaith dialogue.
The purpose of ‘dialogue’ between people of different beliefs is not that one should eventually convince the other of the error of their ways and ‘convert’ them. The purpose is to allow them, as mutual comprehension grows, to embark together upon a journey to a shared new position that would previously have been quite inaccessible – unimaginable – to either.
Such concepts are far from the mind of our storyteller. The black stone statues in the dove-shaped city have all been rendered so because they foolishly clung to their own beliefs and practices instead of accepting that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, even though they were given three years’ notice of the retribution that would befall them if they didn’t wise up.
1000 and One 