As salaamu wa alay kum wa rahmatullahi wa barakath,
While I was checking my inbox this morning, I received an invite from Goodreads inviting everyone who had read Paulo Coelho’s bestseller, ‘The Alchemist’ to ask him any questions if any for a discussion group event to be held on April 2nd 2013, as you may know, this is the Goodreads version of another social network’s similarly titled but much more famous discussion group where they invite celebrities et al for a tête-à-tête with readers across the world, now the book itself is something I had read a long way back, and one of those books I had read cover to cover, though I had a few questions I could ask Coelho, I still wanted to refresh my memory regarding the book itself, so off I went to Wikipedia’s page for ‘The Alchemist’.
Of the many things I read, one thing caught my attention, the ‘The Alchemist’ itself was not Coelho’s first publication but his sixth and all of his previous books were failures, while this too appeared that it was going to tread the same path as the Alchemist’s first publisher, a local publishing house in Brazil, after having had very reasonable success with the book told Coelho in no uncertain terms that, that it was never going to sell, and that “he could make more money in the stock exchange”.
What Coelho did next is inspiring to all those Muslims wanting to bounce back and or reinvent, rediscover themselves.
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