Two Wings

About this book

What if the arms you gave away came back to you as wings? There is a kind of generosity that costs nothing, and a kind that costs everything. You have probably practiced the first kind more often than you'd like to admit - giving from your surplus, your comfortable margin, the part of yourself you were never really going to miss. Ja'far ibn Abi Talib never learned that first kind. He grew up in a house too poor to explain its own generosity, watching his father give away the family's last loaf of bread to a stranger at the door while his own children went hungry that night - and he spent the rest of his life proving that nothing given away in genuine love is ever actually lost. It carried him across a storm-tossed sea to a foreign king's court, through nearly a decade of exile aching for a homeland he couldn't reach, into a marriage built on open eyes rather than easy illusions, and finally onto a battlefield in Syria, facing an army many times the size of his own, where he gave away the very last thing he had left to give. In this book you will: Walk beside a boy who learns, before he has words for it, that what you give away moves to wherever the need is greatest Stand in the court of a foreign king as a frightened company's entire survival rests on a single, honest recitation Feel the specific ache of loving a cause from too far away to serve it with your own hands Recognize the quiet, unglamorous discipline that makes impossible courage possible when it finally matters Understand why fourteen centuries of believers still call him Abu al-Masakin - the father of the poor This is a book for anyone who has ever given something away and privately wondered whether it was worth what it cost them. The bread was never wasted. Neither were the years, nor the exile, nor, in the end, the arms themselves. Open the first page. The rest will find you.