Ali Shariati Poem: Being for Yourself and Being for Others

Dr. Ali Shariati.

From Ali Shariati’s (Farsi) poem One and In Front of It Zeroes Without End (يك ،جلوش تا بينهايت صفر ها), translated by me into Arabic, then into English, for my book Learning Standard Arabic (MSA) for Complete Beginners.

And when you want to be for yourself only; And to be alone; And when you want to be only with the zeros; Your life, like a bent line, will coil around yourself; Like zero.

And in the end, you reach the starting point! You stay, you decay; Like a swamp, like a pond; You become closed, like a circle; Like zero!

But if you want to be only for the sake of “one”; To come out of nothingness and emptiness; And to be a companion of “one”… You must live for the sake of others;

Then your life will move forward like a horizontal line; Like a road; Like a river; And when you want to distance yourself from your “self”; You will eventually reach an inhabited, not ruined and desolate, land; And you will eventually pour into the sea; Like a river …

If you want to be only for the sake of “one”; To come out of nothingness and emptiness; And to be a companion of “one”… You have to die for the sake of others…

Among wolves, among foxes, among rats, among sheep; He rises up and stands;

You will rise up and stand;

Amidst the zeroes,

Like “one”.

Ali Shariati