by KLAUS WERLE
Ferohar Bellagh and Sohaila Belagh look at “The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal.”
PHOTO/Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle
It was a bright sunny day, but 4-year-old Ferohar Bellagh and other preschoolers at Fremont’s Brier Elementary School weren’t interested in going outside.
Instead, they were captivated inside Room 11 by their teacher reading a story of a boy from another country who travels to a neighboring village to find its residents terrified by a dangerous animal.
Ferohar, who wore black braids tied with a pink ribbon, laughed along with her classmates when the forbidding creature turned out to be a mere watermelon.
Having overwhelmed the “animal,” the boy in the story hands out delicious fruit slices to villagers and teaches them how to grow watermelon. The town will henceforth be known as Watermelon Village.
“The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal,” which aims to teach children how to overcome their fears and question prejudices, is one of many children’s stories from the rich oral traditions of Afghanistan.
Its publisher, Hoopoe Books, has published such stories since its inception in 1998. The company, a division of the Los Altos-based educational nonprofit Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, publishes tales collected and retold by the late Afghan author and teacher Idries Shah.
Born in India to a family of Afghan nobility, Shah wrote more than three dozen books before his death in 1966. His writings generally show how Sufism – the mystical dimension of Islam – is a source of wisdom.
Since 2009, Hoopoe Books has distributed the books to Afghan and U.S. libraries, schools and orphanages under the label Books for Afghanistan.
“By repatriating these tales to the nation, we are restoring a part of Afghan cultural tradition and fighting illiteracy,” Hoopoe Books Director Sally Mallam said.
Almost three-quarters of Afghans over the age of 15, according to Hoopoe Books, cannot read or write, while 5 million of the country’s 12 million school-age children have no access to education.
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