William Dalrymple notes the following bit of ecumenical wisdom from the lips of a Kashmiri Sufi named Deen Darvish, who lived in the nineteenth century:
The Hindu says, ‘I am superior’;
The Musulman says I.
Two halves of a grain of mung they are;
Which, then, is greater than the other?
don’t quarrel over who is superior;
And who is not;
The one is a devotee of Ram, the
other of Rahman.
Deen Darvish says, the two unite
in one ocean;
There is only one Lord of all.
The Hindu and the Musulman are
one.
William Dalrymple, “Kashmir: The Scarrred and the Beautiful,” New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008, 14.
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