Les Fleurs

I just finished watching the excellent French film "Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran," for which Omar Sherif won the 2004 Cesar Award (the French Oscar) and the Venice Film Festival Award, both for Best Actor. Sherif plays an older Muslim Turk (Ibrahim) who owns a small grocery in Paris who befriends and eventually adopts a young Jewish boy. While this plot line will make a lot of people roll their eyes, there is something more to be enjoyed behind it.

Many Muslims would find Ibrahim to be a less-than-ideal Muslim. He is a Sufi who drinks on occasion and may dabble in other things some would find distasteful. Yet these subtle flaws round out a beautiful character who neither judges nor preaches, but teaches the young boy everything good he knows about life. He spreads all that is good about his faith without ever going farther into religion than saying, "I know what is in my Quran." He never scolds or condescends. He sets no unlivable rules, he never tries to cast shame. He teaches the boy, Moises (to Ibrahim, "Momo") to find what is beautiful in life, in giving, and in forgiving.

We see Moises enter a mosque with Ibrahim, but we never see him pray or convert. The "religion" does not gain another member who has gone from the wrong team to the right team. But Moises conversion is complete nonetheless. He does not become a Muslim, but he learns how to be a good person.

If only more people were like Ibrahim. And in this, I am not speaking solely about Muslims. I mean all the people who live their lives trying to feel like they have one up on everyone else through their religion, whether they have the "right" religion and others are wrong, or if they simply make themselves feel self-important among their co-religionists through false piety. If they focused less on rules, formulae, and words; focused on what is good in life and in people and what we should all universally strive for and less on who has the right Book and who has insulted whom and whose sites are holier and who is permitted in them and who is not, I think they would all be much closer to the God they pretend to serve.

As Ibrahim says, "All rivers flow into the same sea."