Here is what I did with those milliseconds where an audience gave me ears:

Poetry and the News: Reflections on Being Muslim, American and Human
by Eboo Patel
September 2001

100 years ago, my great-grandfather traveled from a village in Gujarat to the bustling city of Bombay, scared, I am sure, but determined. I never met him, but I know that on his journey he chanted Ya Allah Ya Allah, and felt safe. 25 years ago, my parents crossed continents and oceans from Bombay to the American Midwest, scared, I am sure, but determined. I have no memories from that time, but I know that on their journey they chanted Ya Allah Ya Allah, and felt safe.

That prayer - Ya Allah Ya Allah - has brought calm to Muslims for fourteen centuries. I have called it many times. Last year, when my best friend from high school was involved in a terrible motorcycle accident in Texas, and I was a world away in India, chanting Ya Allah Ya Allah transported my spirit to his side.

On September 11, 2001, Ya Allah Ya Allah, seemed to be the only thing I could say. I know it was the same for Muslims the world over - from Kalamazoo to Karachi, from Cairo to Cape Town. We prayed to ease the horror, we prayed to give strength to the heroes. We prayed for the Indians, Pakistanis, British, Chinese, Japanese, Israelis, and nationals of over 70 other countries; the Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Jains, and those who pray in other ways; the men and women; the bankers and the secretaries and the custodians - we prayed for all those who perished and for all those who pain. And we prayed for America, because America is all of them. We prayed for the rebirth - physical, emotional and spiritual - of a country that has given rebirth to peoples from everywhere.

At the heart of America is an overwhelming openness, a radical love for humankind and an unquenchable aspiration to be better than we are. Occasionally American politicians remind us of this original vision, but more often it is American poets that speak these truths. Take Walt Whitman, the great welcomer. Whitman who said, speaking for America:

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Whitman, who marveled at the diversity of voices in the world:

the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque, the Hebrew reading his records and psalms, the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil.

Whitman, who held so deeply that all of us are from God:

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless - each of us with his or her right upon the
earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

Whitman, who could not stand for any separation from his brothers and sisters the world over:

What cities the light or warmth penetrate I penetrate those cities
myself,
All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.
I am a real Parisian.
I am a habitan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Constantinople

The world has taken a page from Whitman’s book by echoing this spirit of overflowing openness in their sympathy for and solidarity with America. The French newspaper Le Monde ran a banner headline that read, We are all Americans. Candlelight vigils have happened in the center of the world’s great cities.

In America, attention has turned from the rescue effort in New York to the operation in Afghanistan, already one of the most difficult places to live. In these times, it is worthwhile to point out that the most widely-read poet in America today is a Muslim born in that land 800 years ago. Rumi resonates in America because his vision, like Whitman’s, reminds us of the radical love, overflowing openness, and unquenchable aspiration to be better that is America at its best.

Rumi, who could not stand separation, and said:

When I press my hand to my chest,
it is your chest.
And now you’re scratching my head!

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

Rumi, who was wide like Whitman:

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away. What is,
and what isn’t.

Rumi who was not to be entrapped in any passing earthly identity but unyieldingly sought his eternal source:

I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground
My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

I like to think that in some dream world, in some other dimension, Rumi and Whitman are engaged in what sufis call sohbet, a mystical conversation on mystical subjects. They are arguing and agreeing, playing and fighting, wishing they had shared the earth and not just the heavens with one another. Just as there are times when the Angels come to Earth, there are moments when that dimension and ours become one. It is then that Africans and Europeans realize they are Americans, and Americans know that they are Afghans.