Xi'an Mosque in China (Photo: John Emigh)
Xi'an Mosque (Photo: John Emigh)
By some miracle, I woke up on time today for my 9 am Chinese class in Beirut. Afterwards, I studied some Islamic philosophical texts from China–like the passage below–to help me really wake up…
Moreover, the generality of creatures, because of their intense conjunction with this corporeal form and their perfect preoccupation with this material figure, have become such that they do not know themselves apart from it, and cannot make the distinction. Rumi writes in the Mathnawi:
You are this very thought, brother,
the rest of you is bones and fiber.
If your thought is a rose, you’re a rosegarden,
but if it’s a thorn, you’re firewood.
