The Winnowing Winds

My first son has an English project that calls for him to study and present a post-colonial era literature.  And like his calculus and inorganic chemistry problems, he would come to me for assistance and advise.  He is doing his pre-university studies and that is like many, many moons ago, too far in the past for my recollection.

And so my first response was, google it.  He said, I've done it but I could't find anything.  Plus I am not sure what the lecturer means with post-colonial literature.  And so we started discussing back and forth and topics of World War 1, World War II, it was not a world war, no to the first, yes to the second, Rumi, Hemingway, Mark Twain, all came about, and finally fell on Edward Said's Orientalism.  We've got the book on our shelves, I told my son.

In searching, for the book, we came across many books that had passed my mind and memory.  We saw Chomsky's, Robert Fisk's, Karen Armstrong's, Thomas L. Friedman's, Gore Vidal's, David McCullough's, Jared Diamond's.  We saw the novels, Sheldon's, Grisham's, Cornwell's, Ludlum's, Archer's etc., and I noticed the Jean M. Auel's series.  The titles went from The Girl In The Picture to Islam For Dummies, to Soros On Soros, 7 Habits Of Bla Bla  to Gone With The Wind.  We did not find Orientalism until the next day of searching.  We finally found it sandwiched between Sex In History and my second son's school workbook The Truth About Life, Love+Sex (I didn't dare look inside scared to find out what the government was teaching my children).

My son picked up Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, , described as Dr Zhivago For The Far East.  He said I might read this one.

Some of the books belonged to my husband, some were mine.  We had share-read most of them, shared thoughts on them and many too I found that not only I had not read them, I did not even know I owned them.  One of them was Harun Yahya's Learning From The Qur'an.

Books feed the mind, fuel dreams, influence body postures.  The book I found seemed perfect for my learning of the meaning of the Qur'an.  In the foreword Yahya highlighted Qur'an 51:56: "I only created jinn and man to worship Me", and Qur'an 38:29: "It (the Qur'an) is a book We have sent down to you, full of blessing, so let people of intelligence ponder its Signs and take heed."

Surah 51 is Az-Dzariyat, The Winnowing Winds.  I don't know what my son will present to his teacher, but I am excited and grateful I found my book.