The Arab World Geographer \/ Le G\u00e9ographe du monde arabe<\/em> 19: 3-4 (2016)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Professor Emmett begins his article with a quite negative account of the Palestinian Arab city of Nazareth that was written by a nineteenth-century traveler.\u00a0 A former missionary in Indonesia who went on to study Arabic and who has since traveled extensively in the Islamic world, Professor Emmett himself spent (and enjoyed) a year in Nazareth doing research for his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation.\u00a0 And then he closes his article with this comment, with which I heartily concur:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
As a 19th-century pilgrim who also visited Nazareth and had little positive to say, Mark Twain once wrote: \u201cTravel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one\u2019s lifetime\u201d (Innocents Abroad<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tonight, I read Henry B. Eyring, A Sacred Place Like This<\/em> (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2021).\u00a0 It\u2019s a very short book and very small, and it consists mostly of (beautiful) photographs of temples.\u00a0 At the very beginning of the book, President Eyring recalls an experience from his youth:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I recall the first day I walked into the Salt Lake Temple.\u00a0 I was a young man.\u00a0 My parents were my only companions that day.\u00a0 Inside, they paused for a moment to be greeted by a temple worker.\u00a0 I walked on ahead of them, alone for a moment. . . .<\/span><\/p>\nI looked up at a high white ceiling that made the room so light it seemed almost as if it were open to the sky.\u00a0 And in that moment, the thought came into my mind in these clear words:\u00a0 \u201cI have been in this lighted place before.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\ngfBut then immediately there came into my mind, not in my own voice, these words:\u00a0 \u201cNo, you have never been here before.\u00a0 You are remembering a moment before you were born.\u00a0 You were in a sacred place like this.\u201d\u00a0 (3, 6)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
President Eyring\u2019s recollection resonates powerfully with me, because I had a somewhat similar experience many years ago, probably when I was about fourteen or fifteen.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never forgotten it.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was visiting Idaho Falls for the first time, I think with my brother and his wife.\u00a0 (If I\u2019m correct, it was the time that they took me with them on a long loop trip up through Utah, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Banff and Jasper, and then down home to California via Olympic National Park in Washington.\u00a0 I fell in lifelong love with those places on that trip.)\u00a0 We stopped to walk around the temple grounds in the late summer evening, and it grew dark.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In those days, at least, the entrance to the temple consisted of a large area of clear glass, through which someone standing outside could see back to what I now know must have been the recommend desk.\u00a0 I was intrigued, I confess, by a place to which I could not be admitted, and I looked long and curiously at what I could see through the glass.\u00a0 I had just begun to develop an interest in, and a young testimony, of the Gospel.\u00a0 What was this place about?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I saw men and women, all dressed in white, silently passing back and forth before my eyes within this brilliantly illuminated and, to me, mysterious edifice.\u00a0 And suddenly it seemed very familiar, although I had never previously been in Idaho Falls.\u00a0 Not, at least, since I was a very, very small child on the way to Yellowstone with parents \u2014 one an inactive Latter-day Saint and the other a nonmember \u2014 who almost certainly wouldn\u2019t have stopped to visit the temple there but would have simply passed on through.\u00a0 I seemed to remember having been in some such place before, a place that was full of light, quiet and deeply serene, holy, with people dressed in white.\u00a0 I felt as if I were looking into heaven.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never forgotten that piercing and entirely unexpected sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em>, and I can certainly appreciate what the young Henry B. Eyring felt in the Salt Lake Temple.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The thirteenth-century poet Jalal al-Din Rumi is not only one of the greatest figures in the history of Persian literature but one of the very greatest of all Sufi mystics \u2014 Sufism being the mystical tradition in Islam. \u00a0And Coleman Barks, who teaches poetry at the University of Georgia, has become a premiere Western interpreter of Rumi\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I quote here from Coleman Barks, trans., The Essential Rumi<\/em> (Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 1997), some passages illustrating Rumi\u2019s belief \u2014 rare but not wholly unknown among classical Muslim writers \u2014 in the antemortal existence of the human soul or spirit. \u00a0Unfortunately, I\u2019ve been unable to fully reproduce Barks\u2019s formatting:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?<\/span><\/p>\nI have no idea.<\/span><\/p>\nMy soul is from elsewhere, I\u2019m sure of that,<\/span><\/p>\nand I intend to end up there.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen I get back around to that place,<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ll be completely sober. \u00a0Meanwhile,<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.<\/span><\/p>\nThe day is coming when I fly off . . .<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Who looks out with my eyes? \u00a0What is the soul?<\/span><\/p>\nI cannot stop asking.<\/span><\/p>\nIf I could taste one sip of an answer,<\/span><\/p>\nI could break out of this prison for drunks.<\/span><\/p>\nI didn\u2019t come here of my own accord, and I can\u2019t leave that way.<\/span><\/p>\nWhoever brought me here will have to take me home. \u00a0(2)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another passage uses the image of a reed flute, with its plaintive sound, to talk about our finding ourselves \u201cstrangers and foreigners\u201d in this fallen world, still vaguely aware that our true home is elsewhere:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Listen to the story told by the reed,<\/span><\/p>\nof being separated.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cSince I was cut from the reedbed,<\/span><\/p>\nI have made this crying sound.<\/span><\/p>\nAnyone apart from someone he loves<\/span><\/p>\nunderstands what I say.<\/span><\/p>\nAnyone pulled from a source<\/span><\/p>\nlongs to go back.<\/span><\/p>\nAt any gathering I am there,<\/span><\/p>\nmingling in the laughing and grieving,<\/span><\/p>\na friend to each, but few<\/span><\/p>\nwill hear the secrets hidden<\/span><\/p>\nwithin the notes. \u00a0No ears for that.\u201d \u00a0(17-18)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 For something that I\u2019m writing, I read a 2016 article today entitled \u201cLiving and Traveling in the Arab and Moslem Worlds\u201d that was written by my longtime BYU colleague Professor Chad F. Emmett, of the Department of Geography at Brigham Young University: Chad F. Emmett, \u201cLiving and Traveling in the Arab […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27449,2319,4955,27440,9146,27473,27470,27464,18908,27455,27467,24323,24320,23581,27452,27458,1884,2589,25664,22328,4958,19534,19531,27443,27446,5406,6903,27461,641],"class_list":["post-93863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-a-sacred-place-like-this","tag-antemortal","tag-antemortal-existence","tag-antemortal-life","tag-antemortality","tag-chad","tag-chad-emmett","tag-chad-f-emmett","tag-clemens","tag-coleman-barks","tag-emmett","tag-henry-b-eyring","tag-henry-eyring","tag-idaho-falls","tag-idaho-falls-idaho-temple","tag-jalal-al-din-rumi","tag-mark-twain","tag-nazareth","tag-pre-earth","tag-pre-earth-life","tag-pre-mortal","tag-pre-mortal-existence","tag-pre-mortality","tag-reed","tag-reed-flute","tag-rumi","tag-salt-lake-temple","tag-samuel-clemens","tag-temple"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"George](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/01\/idaho-falls-temple-lds-83003-gallery.jpg\")
<\/a>