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| 'City of Djinns - A Year in Delhi' |
| Later,
sitting in a dhaba (roadside restaurant) with Dr Jaffery, I
remarked on how many of the devotees had been Hindus and Sikhs. Dr Jaffery
shrugged his shoulders. 'Hindus and Sikhs also have their dreams which
they wish the saint to make reality,' he said. 'That is one level. Also
you do not have to be a Muslim to beg the saint's help in deeper matters.
Many Hindus, like us, are impatient for the divine. They want to see in
this life a glimpse of the face of God.'
'But the face of God that they would glimpse would be very different from the face you would see, wouldn't it?' 'Naturally,' said the doctor. 'Who is to say what is the true face of the God?' He swung his prayer beads around his index finger. 'Jalal-ud-Din Rumi used to tell a story about a far distant country, somewhere to the north of Afghanistan. In this country there was a city inhabited entirely by the blind. One day the news came that an elephant was passing outside the walls of this city. 'The citizens called a meeting and decided to send a delegation of three men outside the gates so that they could report back what an elephant was. In due course, the three men left the town and stumbled forwards until they eventually found the elephant. The three reached out, felt the animal with their hands, then they all headed back to the town as quickly as they could to report what they had felt. 'The first man said: "An elephant is a marvellous creature! It is like a vast snake, but it can stand vertically upright in the air!" The second man was indignant in hearing this: "What nonsense!" he said. "This man is misleading you. I felt the elephant and what it most resembles is a pillar. It is firm and solid and however hard you push against it you could never knock it over." The third man shook his head and said: "Both these men are liars! I felt the elephant and it resembles a broad pankah (fan). It is wide and flat and leathery and when you shake it it wobbles around like the sail of a dhow." All three men stuck by their stories and for the rest of their lives they refused to speak to each other. Each professed that they and only they knew the whole truth. 'Now of course all three of the blind men had a measure of insight. The first man felt the trunk of the elephant, the second the leg, the third the ear. All had part of the truth, but not one of them had even begun to grasp the totality or the greatness of the beast they had encountered. If only they had listened to one another and meditated on the different facets of the elephant, they might have realized the true nature of the beast. But they were too proud and instead they preferred to keep to their own half-truths. 'So it is with us. We see Allah one way, the Hindus have a different conception, and the Christians have a third. To us, all our different visions seem incompatible and irreconcilable. But what we forget is that before God we are like blind men stumbling around in total blackness...' HarperCollins Publishers © William Dalrymple |
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