The Rice Miracle

The greatest nation, it is said, is imagination. I woke up one day and realised that prodigals were knocking at my door. The unshaven, begging, homeless vagrant who had nothing to his name, no family, no dependants. They were knocking at doors but people didn’t answer. People, the good neighbours, the church people weren’t addressing the real need. Hunger. With all the mighty know-how and spiritual intelligence that the modern church has, values were sorely lacking. Soon, I set to work. Writing out what I called daily mission statements for believers. Whether the individual was Muslim or Christian it didn’t matter to me. Half my family was Muslim and the other half was Christian. At the time it didn’t make any sense to me. Was this a ministry of some sorts that I, who had been through so much, was being called to?

I looked back on my past. Tara, Sunnyside, the numerous stays in psychiatric clinics and hospitals. I needed to feed the poor and I also knew that somehow that would inspire me. I needed to teach people what I knew from my own life experience and that would inspire me to greater levels of achievement. There was Gaza and the Ukraine on the news everyday. There was no news about famine and the education crisis in Africa only headlines about climate change and talks of negotiation at the UN in New York and screaming protestors in Europe and elsewhere on campuses in America.I started handing out these typed mission statements, now photocopied and printed out, to people who came to ask me for something to eat, for clothing to wear, for milk to feed their baby. I was on a mission.

On the 1 June 2025, a Sunday afternoon, late-ish, I had a spiritual awakening while I and my father studied spiritual material. To all intents and purposes, a book containing Islamic material that spoke of and contained great truths and profound insights. I had turned once again to the Don’t Be Sad Book. I found myself again and again returning to the lectures and teachings of Mufti Menk and Nouman Ali Khan. I began to become deeply engrossed in Islamic teachings. It was difficult for me. My mother is a devout Christian and I was raised in the Congregational church. I had been baptised twice, once at birth and then again in my late thirties. I had also been anointed but I started to devote myself to learning about religion. I understood terms like “dua”, “Shahada”, “Sunnah”, “Ameen”. I began to ask myself questions like, what did this all mean? Was I becoming a revert only to be rejected by my mother and brother or was I only a mere student of religion? My life and upbringing has been tough.

I was born during apartheid South Africa. My parents were educationalists. They were hard workers. They instilled getting a good education in my siblings and myself. I was raised by what I had always presumed was sound and basic church doctrine and ideology. There were a few turning points. The Israeli-Palestinian war, a book of poems that I had written entitled Songs For Palestine: Struggle Poems and a book my mother had bought in a Muslim bookstore. It was a last ditch effort to cure my father’s depression and to get him out of bed. It worked and is still working. I now had begun a novel journey that was set to eclipse all the negative feedback of most of my adolescence, twenties and thirties. My education had begun.