Page 15 - The Book of Rumi

ForEWorD

hilip Pullman, the Carnegie Medal winner and internationally celebrated
Pauthor of novels including the trilogy His Dark Materials, has remarked
that “after nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we
need most in the world.”
Whatever our cultural or linguistic background, we can all claim some
knowledge of the lives of others, and this knowledge has reached us through
stories. These stories may have been told by an animated grandparent; maybe
we heard them on the radio or encountered them during a religious-studies
lesson at school, where we learned about the lives and times of saints, gods,
and goddesses.
The literature and history classes that have made the longest-lasting
impressions on me are those in which I was allowed a glimpse of the life
story of a writer or when my teacher focused on the human stories of the
period being taught, peeling away the layers to reveal something of the ordi-
nary life or emotional experiences of the towering fi gures whose conquests
or defeats we were studying or, more poignantly, about the ordinary lives and
emotional experiences of the common people of the time. It really did not
matter whether these peripheral accounts were tenuous or apocryphal, since
their inclusion in the lesson made the whole episode under scrutiny more
gripping and memorable.
Stories need not always refer to the great or the good or the legendary.
In our own daily lives, we continually share snapshots of our social experi-
ences with ever-expanding and overlapping circles of acquaintances. We ritu-
alistically mark an occasion, such as a signifi cant birthday, an anniversary, or
a remembrance, by concentrating on stories that subtly and carefully bring
to the fore an individual’s vulnerabilities, passions, and idiosyncrasies. Like

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