Whisper 16 : Wonder

Journalism students learn that "when a dog bites a man, that is not news. "Man bites dog" is news.

A woman called a doctor live on an Atlantic Radio program to ask why her three-year-old daughter still sucked at her baby's bottle (even if it were empty !). THAT IS NOT NEWS. Another listener later called to advise that woman to put something bitter in the feeding bottle or on its teat to make it disgusting to the child. He said that he had tried that out on his own daughter when she was three and it worked. THAT IS NOT NEWS, either. But then the man conceded that there arose a much bigger problem. "Now my daughter is 27 years old," he explained. "She is a university professor in a foreign country and yet she still sucks her thumb!" THAT IS NEWS, isn't it? But is it odd enough to provoke wonder in anyone?

So what provokes wonder in us? The Kenyan DAILY NATION excalimed : "It’s a mystery: Africans can’t shoot Olympic arrows!" For the author of this article "it is puzzling that Africa doesn’t dominate archery yet no other continent uses bows and arrows for primary purposes as much."

In The Unique Necklace, Ibn Abd Rabbih relates the story of a tabi'i (follower of the Prophet Muhammad's Companions) who was travelling with some of his  students when they came across a drunken man singing a beautiful couplet in Arabic, something like:
My hear has become sick with love,
But there's no way to reach my love. 
The tabi'i then alighted from his horse and hastened to write down those lines. Amazed, his students asked, "You write down words said by a drunken man?" The tabi'i replied: "Haven't you heard the proverb that goes 'A pearl could very well be found in the garbage.' Well, this is a pearl in a garbage!"    

A man was introduced to the Abbassid caliph Harun al-Rasheed as a man of genius who could insert a hundred needles into the eyes of each other in such a way that not a single needle would fall down. The caliph asked the man to show him how he could do that, and when the latter had done that in the most brilliant manner, the caliph turned to his men, and said: "Give this man one hundred dinars and one hundred lashes." Stunned and stupefied, the genius man asked: "Majesty, I can understand why you give me one hundred dinards, but not why you give me one hundred lashes!" The caliph replied: "I give you  a hundred dinars for your genius, and a hundred lashes because you wasted your genius on trivialties."

We are all intelligent, aren't we, but do we always put our intelligence to good use?

"And they marvel that a warner from among themselves hath come unto them, and the disbelievers say: This is a wizard, a charlatan.  Maketh he the gods One God? Lo! that is an astounding thing." (Sad : 4-5)

Innocent Whispers