Learn something new everyday
As many of you know, I work at a weekly newspaper for a small town. The area isn’t that large and we don’t have a lot of staff, so we rely on our readership to get some news to us. We also have community news, which is happenings in and around the different communities in the area of Lake Diefenbaker. Some of those correspondents will add a quote at the end of each news write up for the week. I’ve shared several here.
This one caught my eye, not only for the quote itself, but also by who it is quoting.
“The Friend of God has these three qualities; a generosity like that of the ocean, a compassion like that of the sun, and a humility like that of the earth.” ~Bayazid, Tadhkirat
A little research and I found this at wikipedia.
Tazkirat al-Awliyā
Tazkirat al-Awliyā (Persian: تذکرة الاولیا, literally “Biographies of the Saints”), also transliterated as Tadhkirat al-Awliya or Tazkerat-ol-Owliya, is a 72-chapter book written by the Persian poet and mystic Attar about the life of famous Sufis and their miraculous deeds (Karamats). This is the only surviving work of Attar written as prose. It starts with a biography of Imam Jafar Sadiq , the Sixth Imam of Shia and ends with one of Mansur Al-Hallaj’s , the Sufi Martyr.
Also, as linked in the biographies further down the page:
Bayazid Bastami
Bayazid Bastami (Persian بايزيد بسطامى ), also known as Abu Yazid Bistami or Tayfur Abu Yazid al-Bustami, (804-874 or 877/8[1] CE) was a Persian[2] Sufi born in Bastam, Iran.
Essentially, the use of this quote and the fact it originated from Islamic origins says something about people in this area. For the most part, people in the Lake Diefenbaker region are not quick to get caught up in the furor of hyped inaccuracy. And they are open minded and tolerant enough to see things as they should be seen. Something beautiful and worth learning. We’ve still got a way to go in this area of Saskatchewan, if not the entire province, but I think we’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we could be.
