Dreamers and Settlers: In hopes of learning what it is to dream

We are told to be dreamers. Chase the summit. Don't settle.Imran heard that and built - deals, towers, a name, a second flat he mentions too often. Bilal heard it too, and chose a primary-school classroom, a small warm home, and a faith that said the quiet life could be its own kind of fire.Each one looks at the other and sees a settler.Each one is right about something. Each one is also, in a way neither can see, wrong.Spanning nearly a decade and told through the eyes of an entire family - two brothers, two wives, two children who will inherit whatever was left in the house - Dreamers and Settlers is a novel about what it really means to dream. About a man who closes the biggest deal of his life and finds it tastes like a sip of water. About a man who chose presence over ambition and spent fifteen years wondering, in the dark, if he was faithful or just afraid.Both are dreamers. Both have quietly settled. The book is the long way back to the right balance - for each of them, in his own currency.Tender, funny, and quietly devastating, Dreamers and Settlers is a novel about ambition and faith, about what we build and what we pass down, about the long way round to learning what it is, really, to dream. A note on the world it lives in: This is not a novel about choosing between deen and dunya. The dunya is the field you sow the akhira in - the Quran said so, and this book believes it. Imran's striving is never the sin. Bilal's contentment is never the answer. Both men are right about something, both wrong about something, and neither one gets crowned. What changes, at the end, is not the life - it is the direction the dream is pointing.Part of the Yearnings of the Soul series - standalone books united by one yearning: to know Allah more deeply. Book One, THE AUTHOR KNOWS: Why We Glance at the Sky, is written in the yearning to observe God's presence. Book Two, Dreamers and Settlers: In Hopes of Learning What It Is to Dream, is written in the yearning to live the way God intended. Book Three, Walk into Love: Toward True North, is written in the yearning to love someone in a way that pleases God.

Pagina's: 244, Paperback, Independently published