Title: Untitled Story
Artist: Participant D (Boy, Age 14)
Year: 2025
Transcribed story
Title: Untitled Story
Karim, a young boy, born in Morocco, grew up but on his way of becoming an adult, he grew tired of the wasteful streets with rubbish scattered across each village road. Growing up in Sufism, his mother expressed passion to not ruin the environment and God’s creation. But in his mind, it had become normalised. Though it was normalised, Karim never did it as he was never prepared for the scolding his Mum would give him.
One day Karim was out with his best friend, Hadi and they had just finished eating their kebabs after playing football and were heading home. Karim put his kebab [wrapper] in the bin, but Hadi decided to throw it and missed, which then landed on a small bird’s face and as he was crossing the road, it blocked his view and a large van drove over it neglecting what it had done. This caused a terror in Karim’s eyes, shocked at what he had just seen when he got home, it was a trouble to his mind, pacing up and down the corridor. As he paced up and down, he thought to himself how such a little thing in life like not putting a wrapper in the bin can affect the world and mainly God’s creation. So, he thought to himself that if no one would act on it, he would act on it.
Karim had fire in his eyes and God’s creation in his heart as passionately forced his neighbours and locals out their house each individually telling him to change.
Curatorial Note:
This piece was created by Participant D, a 14-year-old boy based in the UK, during an individual Story Design Workshop conducted as part of the Sufi Storytelling Project at the University of Edinburgh.
The young storyteller described what he wished to narrate:
Participant D: “It kinda means like, you might not think it's such a big deal or it's not a problem for you. But it will be a problem for something else and it might impact something greater and you never know. Like just, yeah, this, if it's a small thing, you should take care of it.”
Researcher: “How does the Sufi dimension come into play in this?”
Participant D: “Sufis, like, believe, like, you should be, like, loving to everything and careful of what you do. And yeah, that's what I believe how it comes into play.”
Themes:
Environment, Islam, Care, Creation
Citation:
Participant D. (2025) Untitled story. In: Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art by Children and Families (curated by H.E. Üzümcü). University of Edinburgh. DataShare Repository. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8175.
Copyright & Licence Statement:
© 2025 Participant D. This work is published in anonymised form with the consent of the participant and his caregiver as part of the Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art by Children and Families, University of Edinburgh. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. You may share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes, provided appropriate attribution is given.
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