New Tales for Old

Introduction

Horace thought an author should leave a poem for nine years before publishing it. Most of this book was written more than twenty years ago and only now sees the light of day.

The Robin Hood story deals with the interesting figure of the man who, when tyranny and corruption reigns, finds himself an outlaw. The Dracula story is about the dualism of our age’s imagination and its necessity to believe in an ultimate metaphysical evil. “And why not?” derives from a personal experience. Billy the Kid was inspired by the early American history of opposition to banking, a history that is less well known than it ought to be.

Otello was a response to Zeferelli’s film of the Verdi opera of the same name.

Gaelic literature is replete with accounts of the meeting between Oisin (Ossian) and Patrick, and expresses eloquently the ambivalent attitude of the old Gaels to the new Christianity.

“The Greatest Name of Allah” is a story that I heard orally, and, while on Hajj, some aspects of it came to me and I wrote them down.

The poem “God is Dead” was conceived as prose on O’Connell Street in Dublin while gazing on the happy shoppers.

“The Colt” is a much later poem, which, contrary to God is Dead, I actually intended from the first as a poem.

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

The most enduring literature of any language is still and always that which has a divine purpose, however symbolically treated, and however that may be defined. Even great political works may resonate. But with this collection of stories, the heart is foremost and the intellect lively. This deliciously animated collection of tales by master Irish storyteller ventriloquist (taking many voices in these stories and poems) author, scholar, book designer and Imam, Abdassamad Clarke, brings out the wished for hidden history of Muslims in classics such as Robin Hood, and the old Merlin tales with Clarke’s sweet wizardry — sterling examples of tales told with a moral and an instructive agenda, but all made easy to digest by the sheer magic of the language and imagination engaged in forging them. Two poems of symbolic counsel for the Path of spiritual attainment round out the collection to a T (for Tawheed!).