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[ by Charles Cameron — double-quoting a remark taken from Zen’s most recent post with a Sufi teaching tale out of Idries Shah ]
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Zen — Zenpundit, Mark Safranski (above) that is — had a powerful comment about “the emaciated Somali followers of a two-bit warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, gleefully swarming over and looting our military’s former…. garbage dump” tucked away in his recent post on Strategy, Power and Diffusion:

When the enemy has a land so poor that he treasures and makes use of the crap you throw away, the economic spillover of your logistical supply lines will fund his war against you.

That’s a pretty profound statement about different levels of disparity, if you ponder it a bit. And worth pondering.

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And it reminds me of Idries Shah‘s lovely story The Food of Paradise, in which a fellow named Yunus, son of Adam sets out to find the source, the original source, of food.

Sitting by a riverbank to consider the matter, he spies a package floating downstream, rescues it, and find that it contains a delicious halwa “composed of almond paste, rosewater, honey and nuts and other precious elements” – surely a gift of providence — which he then eats. The next day, at the same time, a second package appears – and each day thereafter he wades further upstream, in search of the miraculous giver, each day receiving and appreciating the gift.

In time he comes to an island with a high tower, from a high window of which a maiden is casting out, each day, the packaged halwa which is to him the food of paradise. After considerable efforts involving a mirror stone and an army of jinn, he manages to present himself to this princess, and asks her:

How, and by what order, is the Food of Paradise, the wonderful halwa which you throw down every day for me, ordained to be deposited thus?

to which she replies:

Yunus, son of Adam, the halwa, as you call it, I throw down each day because it is in fact the residue of the cosmetic materials with which I rub myself every day after my bath of asses’ milk.

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You can read the whole tale with many others in Idries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes, or here on the alhaddad blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 at 10:09 pm and is filed under myth, story, sufi, Uncategorized, Zen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.