Connections

No matter how many books they have, scholars tend to gravitate towards bookshops. A decade or so ago, Professor Khaled Abou el Fadl spent many hours in our bookshop, perusing every single shelf, pulling out books while giving a running commentary and review of those he has read. I saw enacted before my very eyes the literary device Abou el Fadl employed in his book The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books in which the author engages in nightly dialogues with classical authors of the Islamic intellectual tradition: present reader in communion with absent author. Another scholar who spent a lot of time in our bookshop was Shaykh Hamzah Yusuf. I was pleasantly surprised when, about five years ago, he spoke about his fascination with the work of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Argentine essayist Jorge Luis Borges. (So it came as no surprise to me that Shaykh Hamzah placed Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in his inaugural list of books for his First Command Book Club in 2022.) These scholars are walking libraries in their own right, having had a lifetime of voracious reading and synthesis. But still they walk into bookshops. Perhaps they know that wherever they are in the world, they are at home in book-lined rooms.

When Dr Tarek Elgawhary was in Singapore for the Conference on Fatwa in Contemporary Societies organised by MUIS in February 2024, he too visited our bookshop. In fact his first of what turned out to be daily visits while he was in Singapore was straight from the airport. Elgawhary handed me a copy of his book In Search of Mindfulness: A Guide to the Good Life from Islamic Sources (which Wardah now stocks). I have since read the book and enjoyed it very much. It is, as Elgawhary characterised it, an introduction to an introduction to sufism. In addition to drawing from the works of al-Ghazali and Ibn Ata Allah, Elgawhary quotes liberally from Marcel Proust and mentions in his book that he made a commitment to read all four thousand pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Elgawhary’s references to Proust, as well as Shaykh Hamzah’s love of Dostoyevsky, may prima-facie seem incongruent with their vocation as Islamic scholars. But upon reflection, I recalled what von Goethe wrote in Faust:

“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”

No matter what you encounter, if your heart is centred, you will draw connections that augment what the heart knows and recognises of truth and beauty. Elgawhary spells it out plainly in his chapter on Divine Unity,

“Everything you experience is nothing other than a constant stream of God's manifestation upon the created universe; nothing escapes it, everything is connected to Him.”