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learning from their stories.
In his midteens, orphaned, he was free to pursue his desire for a formal education. He made his
way to a neighboring country called Bahrain, and raced through its educational system, ranked as the
top student in the country every year till he graduated from school.
My father was free as a child to do what he wanted. He pursued an education. Using an Islamic
turn of phrase, he “went as far as China for knowledge.”
Why am I recounting this to you, Saif? For two reasons. The first reason is that I want you to
understand that even when a person is stripped of family and any income, it is possible through force
of will and ingenuity for this person to forge a path through life. And by path, I mean a path of noble
and worthy struggle. This your grandfather did. He had only his wits to guide him.
The second reason is that as I looked at the short life he led, I tried to imagine how he would have
brought my siblings and me up. I found that no matter how much I heard about him from your
grandmother or from his acquaintances, there was a tremendous void. This void was the void of not
knowing him myself. The void was the emptiness of building up an impression based on other
people’s faulty and sometimes contradictory memories.
And then one day it dawned on me that every time I asked myself, what would my father have
said?—or, what would my father have done?—I was making up the answer on the basis of what I
thought was best. I was guessing what my father would have done, on the basis of a series of stories
about him. I realized that in imagining what he might have done, I had a choice. I had a choice in
deciding what kind of a life he would have lived.
This did not happen overnight. It took years for me to accept that there were many things I could
never and can never know about your grandfather. It is painful to think that a person lives on only in
the fading memories of those who knew him. And with the years, one by one his friends who could
have told me more began passing away. With every passing, I could feel memories of my father being
erased. And then one day I grasped the truth that I was creating an image of my father based on what I
wanted him to be. And like a good son, I wanted my father to be the best father and person in the
world.
This letter is partly linked to my letter to you on role models. How we model ourselves—or who
we model after—is a choice. We choose how to imagine our role models, how to understand them,
how to paint them, and how to bring them to life. I want you to bring the mechanism of your
imagination out into the open and create yourself and the world around yourself—according to the
best and highest standards.
I struggled for many years with the collective idea of my father. These were ideas that others had
given me, and ideas that I myself projected onto him. So in a direct way I do not deal with his reality,
but with the ideas of what he could have been, what I wanted him to be, and what he may have been
had he lived longer.
I believe this was not just the moment when I began to think of the historical facts regarding my
father’s life and how I could construct a consistent and faithful picture of him, but also the moment