Learning to Pray, the Right Way
In a kingdom of long ago, there was a dervish from a very strict school who was one day strolling along a river bank. As he walked he pondered great problems of morality and scholarship.
For years he had studied the word of the Prophet. Through study of Prophet's sacred language, he reasoned, he would one day be blessed with Mohammed's divine illumination and acquire the ultimate Truth.
The dervish's ruminations were interrupted by a piercing noise: some person was incanting a dervish prayer. What is this man doing? he wondered to himself. How can he be mispronouncing the syllables? He should be saying "Ya Hu" instead of "UYaHu." It was his moral duty, he thought, to correct his brother, to set him straight on the path to piety.
Accordingly, he hired a boat and rowed his way to an island, the source of the errant incantation. He found a man sitting in front of a hut, dressed in frayed wool. The man swayed in time to his rhythmic repetitions. So engrossed was he in his sacred incantation that he did not hear the first dervish's approach.
"Forgive me," the first dervish said. "I was in town and heard your prayer. With all due respect, I believe you have erred in your prayer. You should say 'Va Hu' instead of 'U Ya Hu.' "
"Thank you so much for your kindness," the second dervish said. "I appreciate what you have done."
Pleased with his good deed, the first dervish boarded his boat. Allah, he reasoned, would take notice of his pious efforts. As it was said, the one who can repeat the sacred incantation without error might one day walk on water. Perhaps one day he'd be capable of such a feat.
When the first dervish's boat reached midstream, he noticed that the second dervish had not learned his lesson well, for the latter continued to repeat the incantation incorrectly. The first dervish shook his head. At least he had made the proper effort.
Lost in his thoughts, the first dervish then witnessed a bizarre sight.
The bumbling second dervish walked on the water and approached the first dervish's boat. Shocked, the first dervish stopped his rowing.
The second dervish walked up to him and said: "Brother, I am sorry to trouble you, but I have to come out to ask you again the standard method of making the repetition you were telling me, because I find it difficult to remember it."
The most important and difficult lesson that a sensuous scholarship provides is that of humility. No matter how learned we may become, no matter how deeply we have mastered a subject, the world, for the sensuous scholar, remains a wondrous place that stirs the imagination and sparks creativity. Those who struggle with humility, no matter their scholarly station, admit willingly that they have much to learn from forgetful old men and women who, at first glance, seem to have little knowledge to impart. They not only have precious knowledge to convey but can teach us much about living in the world.
Among the Songhay of Niger it is usually this kind of person who is possessed by the sacred words of history and the powerful secrets of sorcerous power. It is their humility, I think, that enables them to receive knowledge and transform it into wisdom. The late Edmond Jabes understood the wisdom of this primary lesson of sensuous scholarship: I see myself again in the deserts of Egypt, looking for pebbles-yellow, sometimes brown-digging them out of the sand, taking them home for the sake of the human face that would suddenly emerge out of their nothingness-an eternal human face that time had modeled for centuries, not mere moments-their face alive against life. Along amid sand, whose every grain bears witness to an exhausted wind, a desolate world, I was satisfied with appearance, whereas it is inside the stone that the heart of death is merrily at work, where, with a beat of heaven or hell, the closed universe of eternity is written.
Story above and excerpt from Sensuous Scholarship, by Paul Stoller, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997
