Yahia lababidi biography of martin luther king
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Radical Love: Delight, Beauty, be proof against Islam’s Mystic Tradition
Photo: Zakaria Wakram
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Angele Ellis: Love in a Time of Genocide | In Palestine Wail, Yahia Lababidi seeks the redemption of the human soul
Palestine Wail: Poems by Yahia Lababidi. Daraja Press, 2024.
Yahia Lababidi’s eleventh book draws on the spiritual and aphoristic traditions of Middle Eastern and Arab American poetry—from Rumi to Kahlil Gibran—as well as on its vein of political and social critique. This makes Lababidi’s brief free verse poems at once meditations on peace and bulletins from the battlefield.
In his introduction to this collection, Lababidi references not only the Sufi mystic Rumi and the Christian allegorist Gibran, but a range of notable writers and rebels of the past century, including Martin Luther King, Scott Peck, Leonard Cohen, and Elie Wiesel.
In a passionate afterword, Lababidi evokes the spirits of Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) and Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)—separated by a generation, yet both killed by Israeli bombs, along with members of their families. He advocates for an end to the “daily horrors” which since this past October, have deprived 2.3 million Palestinians of their homes. According to the latest figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, and thousands mo
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INTRODUCTION from the book Palestine Wail
“Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.” That line, from a movie adaption of Damage by Josephine Hart, affected me deeply the first time I heard it as a young man. In context, it was delivered as a perverse badge of courage. It also gives voice, of course, to a cautionary tale or warning. When our hearts break, do they break open or do they harden?
We can live like a hardened scab, impervious to the mighty winds that shake the mutilated world around us, or become more like an open wound, sensitive to the slightest breeze of suffering or injustice we encounter. I believe most of us try both ways and oscillate between one and the other. “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.” This aphorism was coined by Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, a visionary who recognized, profoundly, that our wounds and those of the world are ultimately one. What that suggests is that our larger allegiances must be to one another, past the narrow-heartedness of loyalty to any particular nation-state. After all, as the big-thinking and generously spirited Einstein put it, nationalism is finally “an infantile disease…the measles of humankind.”
Ultimately, daring to care about the pain of others is not