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Perhaps if the children are brought up with religious tolerance and taught that the common ground of all religions is to make them better people, the world could be more peaceful.
This book is the story of a man who has the assets of natural intelligence, the love and guidance of parents whom he lost early in life, good friends and teachers and a diligence to help him along a very bumpy journey of life. He also has a deep need to satisfy his spiritual questions and follows an equally bumpy journey of faith. Eventually, he closes the circle around his beliefs and at the center of that circle finds the shining light of the Truth.
This story really begins thousands of years ago.
In the millennia before Messengers and Prophets brought the Word of God, mankind had the desire to accept a supernatural power, which governs the universe. Lacking enlightenment, this journey would end in idol worshiping.
It was perhaps almost 4000 years ago when Abraham was born seven generations after Noah in the most fertile land on earth where mountains, desert and two big rivers meet. He was the Abraham who would become the father of three major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A few hundred miles to the northeast, at almost the same century, came a Messenger of Zoroastrian. Also about this time, hundreds miles eastward in the Indian subcontinent, the Vedic Aryan people started singing the song of Brahma.
During the next five hundred years, while the Three Commandments of Zoroastrian were spreading eastward, the children of Abraham brought the Ten Commandments and the Vedic developed teaching about the duties of life as well as spiritual obligations. The Vedic teachings of dharma (moral law) would give rise to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.
A thousand years of human suffering passed until Gautama Buddha showed the way to eternal enlightenment with the Four Noble Truths of Wisdom, Virtue, Concentration and the Noble Eightfold Path. Yet few were able to end their suffering as had Buddha. Far to the west, Greek civilization was flourishing where Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great thinkers would soon develop lasting contributions to mankind’s journey. Five hundred years later, God in the person of the Savior came with a message of love. Still, the suffering of the Christ did not end human suffering. After another 500 years, the last prophet of the children of Abraham brought Islam.
At the crossroads of commerce and goods and concepts stands Iran. It is here that the Sufi faith developed, influenced by and influencing these eternal teachings. Here too, in the latter half of the twelfth century, Rumi, a teenager running away from Genghis Kahn’s army of Mongols, meets Attar and receives from Attar, "The Book of the Divine". This meeting and Attar’s writings inspire Rumi to his own poetic career. Attar, in turn, perhaps inspired by many Sufis before him wrote "The Conference of the Birds" in which 30 birds seek the truth and, after much tribulation, find it in a surprising way.
The Truth they find is all the more remarkable since, at the time of the writings, that Truth had led to the torture and death of those who spoke it. Sufi writings had, of necessity, taken to hide their true religious meetings in seemingly innocuous metaphors. These writings and the lives of their authors have largely inspired this story of Sam.
Fifteen hundred years have now passed since the birth of Islam and mankind still seems unable to progress spiritually despite great advances in other facets of human life. It is into this world that Sam is born.
Sam studies, believes and even converts into those religions, but his appetite for searching the truth is not fulfilled with the simple knowledge of those religions.
Sam begins to understand the goal of his quest in an unpretentious fable about an angel coming from heaven looking for fire to smoke a pipe. His knowledge of all religions, a heart full of love and inspirations drawn from the mystic language of Attar and Rumi help him to reach the truth.
It is only with a clear conscience that one can see Heaven
and Peace.