A whirling dervish in Aleppo, Syria
At St. Jude in Beirut/CCCL (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
Today, many Muslims around the world are celebrating Mawlid un-Nabi. Yesterday, on the eve of this special day, while I was playing with a two-year old Syrian refugee with cancer at St. Jude in Beirut, her mom shared with me fond memories of watching Sufis in Syria celebrate this popular holiday with ecstatic whirling and large, public dhikrs back home. But since the war in Syria began, she explained, all public celebrations in her city have ceased…
As we began teaching her daughter how to count in Arabic, by dropping marbles one by one into a plastic cup, I thought of all the other numbers being tallied here in Lebanon. The number of Syrian refugees. The number of books burned. The number of rebels wounded. The number of bystanders killed…
While counting marbles, I began to wonder: when will peace return to Syria, and set those Sufis whirling again? When will my little friend recover from cancer, and return home to count dervishes in Damascus–instead of marbles in Beirut? When, I wondered, will open hearts join together to make a more peaceful future for today’s children–to last long after we’ve all whirled on…
