A Border Passage Quotes

We too live our lives haunted by loss, we too, says Rumi, remember a condition of completeness that we once knew but have forgotten that we ever knew. The song of the reed and the music that haunts...

In the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi...the song of the reed is the metaphor for our human condition, haunted as we so often are by a vague sense of longing and of nostalgia, but nostalgia for we know n...

And yet also, as I sit here now, in these halls, in this house of memory, it is not in those days and those moments that my story begins. Rather, it begins for me with the disruption of that world...

I grew up in the last days of the British Empire. My childhood fell in that era when the world's "imperialism" and "the West" had not yet acquired the connotations they have today—they had not ye...

Postwar revelations about the death camps in Germany and America's dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki now called into question the very notion of European and Western civilization. Ma...

[...] I turned over and over in my mind all that was happening to us. How Father had struggled on the right side and how he had been crushed by this political giant, this great hero of our Arab wor...

Father admired Mother's voice enormously and would say that she could have been a professional singer. "But Mother was not a professional anything!" I find myself involuntarily thinking, in a thoug...

Today we are so used to the idea of Egypt as "Arab" that it seems unimaginable that Egyptians ever thought of themselves as anything else. In fact, I made this assumption myself when I first began...

Nevertheless, the act of conscience was Father's, and it was he rather than Mother who would have had the satisfaction of knowing that he had done what he believed he had had to do. (22)

It was on one such occasion, waking up in the middle of the night and lying still, listening for Nanny's breathing, that I saw my guardian angel, the angel that, Nanny had told me, was always there...