O hand of goodness, wiping the barren desert into fertility and harvests, making it sprout heroism in history, planting its banners in the suns.

... A grain of sand said to a grain of sand:

It is as though I have been watered, O my neighbor!!

For I no longer feel the burning of the eternal thirst in the dryness of my heart.

And I, upon this desert, am as though I were the shimmer of water in the springs of Paradise!

And it is as though this desert were no longer mirage and sands, no longer abasement and begging!

O my sister, heaven is stirring within me, and after this long stretch, the earth can no longer contain me.

And a dry stone said to a stone like itself, in the open spaces of the Kaaba:

It is as though my ribs were splitting, and a swaying all but uproots me from this ground.

I bind myself to myself, but I come apart, as though I were crumbling, grain by grain, into the dust!

And Abd al-Muttalib bound me yesterday with iron... so why are my ribs limp within the iron?!

And the light rises over the plain of Mecca, and behold, every grain of sand is a violet, and behold, the stones of the Kaaba are crumbled dust.

... And in the desert is a great prophet...

Muhammad — among words, a great word that entered the letters with the purest purity letters have ever known...

And among men, Muhammad is a man in whom are all the colors of heroism...

He sowed history in every rising-place of the sun and every setting-place of the sun...

O Muhammad, O son of Abd al-Muttalib...

O great Muhammad!!

On this feast!

Does any one of us dare, on this feast, to cry out your name, O Prophet of God??

And these bowed foreheads — do they dare to rise up out of the dust?..

On this feast??

And these hearts, filled with doubt and suspicion and fear — do they dare come before you carrying their doubt and their fear??

And O great Muhammad!

We have today idols and divining arrows which they bind with iron lest they crumble — who will give us a sacred hammer, O Prophet of God??

And we have dry stones, with dry hearts and dry minds, set up in every open space of our land and our country...

And we, in our land and in our country, still rub our foreheads in the dust at the feet of these stones...

A hammer, O Prophet of God... a hammer of fire and of flame beneath which the ribs of these carved stones fall apart... so that nothing remains to us but the truth...

And let our faith — ours — in the truth remain, O Prophet of God... and let the truth be glorified.

From 'On Everything'