Book Review: Three Cups of Tea

Millions of students in Afghanistan are still waiting for their new textbooks, promised and paid by US and foreign donors, the Associated Press recently announced. The news reminded me of the pioneer who introduced this human aid to impoverished Muslim areas: Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time.

Three Cups of Tea inspires the kind face of human nature. It highlights the principle of paying it forward. Here, Greg Mortenson, an aspiring mountaineer trying to ascend K2, stumbled across the Islamic culture in one of the remotest areas on earth: Pakistan’s Karakoram Himalaya. The modest villagers who found him hanging to life while lost in the remote area nursed him till he regained strength and health. This kind act brought the villagers what they have dreamt of all of their lives: a school that Mortenson promised to build. Thus, Mortenson declared war on illiteracy with the most effective weapons: knowledge from books taught at schools. His good deed became a national project throughout Pakistan’s impoverished land. Across a Muslim community, he became a popular Christian who won people’s hearts and challenged the status quo with books and not with bombs.

For several years thereafter, he lived in Muslim lands and interacted with Muslims as one of them. Describing the first time he joined communal prayers with other Muslims, he wrote: “kneeling among one hundred strangers, watching them wash away not only impurities, but also, the aches and cares of their daily lives, he glimpsed the pleasure to be found in submission to a ritualized fellowship of prayer.” Mortenson’s memoir unveils many myths lumping Muslims. My favorite is his honest account of an incidence that brings out the many virtues in Islam, one like justice. In 2003, a Shariah court ruled in his favor against a Muslim Mullah. That Mullah, according to Mortenson’s book, was a corrupt individual who opposed Mortenson’s activities of building schools for Muslim girls. The Mullah demanded that Mortenson be banned from carrying out his projects, claiming that his activities were anti-Muslim. Yet, the Muslim court stood up for the American stranger after evaluating the case.

“Three Cups of Tea” is a folklore custom with a deep analogy according to Mortenson. Pakistani locals offer the first cup of tea to a stranger out of hospitality, and they offer the second one to a guest, but by the third cup of tea, the stranger becomes one of the family. A pretty neat custom, chivalry-like, that many more sophisticated and civilized people across the globe don’t have it.

If you read Three Cups of Tea, what did you like about it the most?