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Edited on Wed Dec-05-07 05:33 PM by KCabotDullesMarxIII
I couldn’t find a link on their web-site, but this beautiful letter was sent into the Daily Mail (UK) by a lady called Fiona Turner. I hope it will help to serve as a corrective to the often distorting mirror our media hold up to the Moslem world.
Suleiman was our magnificent friend
MY FAMILY lived in Khartoum in the early sixties when many British families employed domestic help. We had Suleiman, a young Moslem man. If he ever had any doubts about looking after a house and a noisy family of three English girls, he never showed it. He had an implacable aura of dignity. If there was a social gathering at home and Suleiman noticed my parents tiring, he would appear with a tray of glasses of water, signalling to the guests it was time to leave. Nobody argued.
He would sit on the terrace and spoon-feed my baby sister, smiling patiently as she threw her food around. And if we somewhat wilder, older girls decided to run through the gardens, jumping off a trapeze or climb a tree, he would make sure we came to no harm without actually limiting our freedom.
We grew to love him – and wanted to be ‘just like Suleiman’. We begged him to make us look like him. He agreed and by some miraculous dexterity turned two towels into turbans for us, approximating the head-dress he wore.
We wanted to have prayer mats like his, which were supplied by a friend of his who owned a carpet shop. Thereafter, we’d run into the garden putting our prayer mats out and imitating Suleiman at prayer. My mother in obedience to the fasting at Ramadan told Suleiman he was not to think of cooking for us at that time, but at the end of Ramadan he always made us a cake that we shared together. At Christmas, he would wish us happiness and we would give a present to his young son, Mohammed.
We left Sudan and lived in many other countries, but Suleiman’s name had woven itself into the fabric of our family discourse. My parents often spoke of him over the decades and always with gratitude, but I realised that my memories of him had faded.
My father used to laugh and say:’When you were little, you girls wanted to be just like him’, and he would tell the story of the turbans and the prayer mats. Not long ago I found a photo of myself, taken in Khartoum,: a young child sitting on a bicycle. And there holding me in case I fell off, was Suleiman. (On edit: a beautiful photograph, by the way). I felt a convulsion of grief. I had forgotten his physical presence and his voice, but I remembered with a profound sense of recognition his sense of spiritual calm and his protectiveness.
In a split second, I felt something like panic that I would never see him again. It was as though he was reaching out from the photo from all those years ago. I wonder what Suleiman would make of the diplomatic situation between Sudan and Britain now. He had something that is lacking in the world today: grace. He had the mark of the truly religious person, of whatever religion, who is at peace with himself and, mostly, at peace with the world. How I wish the world was more like him.
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