His blog post at Washingtonpost’s On Faith: Who Sings for Islam?
The piece I was going to write – “Who Speaks for Islam”, based on the exceptional new book by Dalia Mogahed and John Esposito – is going to have to wait for another day.
Last Saturday night, I went to see A Mystical Journey, a concert bringing together Muslim musicians from all over the world. It was everything that music should be. There were moments of hush and moments of roar, there was calm and there was storm. Which is to say, it felt like prayer.
I believe that discussions of the prose of religion – the rules and the laws of the tradition, statistics measuring what the members of the community think – are crucial. Those matters are the subject of most of my columns in “The Faith Divide”.
But I think the heart of faith itself is not prose, it’s poetry – songs and art, not statistics and laws. And if, when we talk about faith, we focus on the prose and ignore the poetry, then we miss the deeper possibilities, especially the possibility of cosmic connection. Which is to say, we miss the point.
Ismailimail 