The ZamZam Cooler

"Over forty years ago, when Lahore was still a beautiful garden city, I remember visiting the tomb of the famous Sufi saint Mian Mir in the fields outside the city, a sanctuary now surrounded by the horrid sprawl of the once beautiful Lahore. It was nighttime, and I decided to take a horsedrawn carriage called a tonga back to town. The driver appeared to be very poor and was scantily dressed. At the beginning of our trip, he greeted me with the Islamic greeting and asked me in Urdu where I was from. I answered in Persian that I was from Persia. He became excited and smiled. Then he began to recite God knows how many sublime Persian poems of 'Attar, Rumi, Hafiz, and others on Divine Love and the nostalgia of the soul for God, rendering all those poems as if he had experienced what was described in them and had composed the poems himself. That example -- riding in that carriage that night under the starry sky of the Punjabi countryside listening to an illiterate tonga driver reciting some of the most sublime mystical love poetry ever written, reciting both from memory and from the center of his heart -- shows how universal the living reality of the love for God is in the Islamic spiritual universe. This love uses the sublime language of Sufi poets, but this poetry speaks for all those Muslims, technically Sufi and non-Sufi alike, who are aware of God's Love for His creation, those whose own love for God, hidden within the very primordial substance of their souls, has begun to stir and the steed of whose souls has turned in the direction of that spiritual homeland from which they have come and to which they yearn to return."