I don't know you, but I love you: my Iraqi grandpa

This story is not mine to tell-- it is Mohammad's (name changed for protection). Mohammed is an older Iraqi gentleman I grew quite close to while working in Jordan on a bookmobile for Iraqi refugees. Mohammad was Shi'a, from Baghdad, a consummate academic with two PhDs, a renowned career in Computer Science and Linguistics, and the most creative and energetic mind I have ever encountered. He also was an illegal refugee who couldn't hold a legal job, and thus worked off the books part time at a third-rate Jordanian technical college while squatting with his daughter, a doctor who was legally in Amman as a resident. Despite his difficult circumstances, I never saw him in anything but a suit, he refused to let me pay, and he insisted on picking me up and taking me home in a taxi. His immense dignity in the face of such hopelessness to this day leaves me a little breathless.

Mohammad was kidnapped in Baghdad in 2006. As a higher-up in the Iraqi Computer Science Society circles, he had the reputation and the money that brought unwanted attention. His family paid ransom and two weeks later he was returned. He fled to Amman that very night, as most of the elite did during those crazy days when Baghdad lost itself. I knew him thanks to a connection from the Iraqi Cultural Attache to the Iraqi Embassy in DC, who introduced me to the Amman-based 'shadow cabinet' of elite Iraqi refugees. Mohammad and I met for the first time at a Tex-Mex restaurant in downtown Amman, ordered large beers, and began to plan. We made an odd pair--a 65 year old, stately, gray-haired Iraqi man in a suit and a 25 year old tall blond American chick who was anything but stately. But man, did we get along.

He told me this story one night, large Amstel squarely in hand. It takes place in 2007, during the height of the war. I will tell it now in his voice, and in his great honor:

I got a call one day on my cell in Amman from an Iraqi number I didn't know, a Baghdad number. I pick up the phone. "Is this Mohammad?" "Yes." "Mohammad who was Professor of Computer Science?" "Yes." "I don't know you, but I love you." "Excuse me?" "I don't know you, but I love you, my brother." "I love you to...please, who is this?"

The man on the other end of the phone goes on to explain that he had gotten my number from someone at the Ministry of Technology, as he figured someone there would know me. I asked again who he was. He told me the following story:

'I was walking down the street in my neighborhood the other day, coming home from work. A sheet of paper blew at me. I picked it up and saw it was someone's handwriting. I began to read it. Another blew over to me, I read that too. And another, and another. I walked home reading these papers, coming now in twos and threes, and soon realized I was reading the journal of some extraordinary mind. Writings on language, and culture, and politics, art and humor and love. I walked slowly for an hour, falling in love with whoever wrote these great words. Finally I start coming upon ripped out pages of books, sheets of equations that had been destroyed. I start running. I see a dumpster full of the content, the life, of someone's mind-- notebooks, books and papers tossed carelessly by looters. I ran to my house and got my wife and daughters and made them come with me and gather up all we could salvage. In reading them over, I came upon your name. I've spent the past two weeks reading your great mind, Mohammad. I love you.'

This man offered to go check on Mohammad's house, which had obviously been vandaled by looters. Mohammad thanked him but said no, he didn't want to put him into danger and he'd ask one of his brothers to go. The men hung up with words of thanks and love.

Mohammad told this story without pretense-- to him, it was just a fact that his countrymen had such deep human compassion. To me, it was a revelation that even in the middle of war and ruin, such immense grace can exist.

You earn your stories, and I did not earn that one. That being said, it's a privilege to tell it.