Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2001

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Life’s Journey and the Acquisition of Faith and Wisdom

Schmitt traces his protagonist Moses’s path from boyhood to manhood. Abandoned by his mother shortly after his birth and subject to his father’s emotionless demeanor and criticism, Moses lacks the affective framework to grow into a well-adjusted, loving man. He is driven to an early adolescence of deceit, petty thievery, and transactional sex. Few consistent markers guide his course towards adulthood.

After bonding with Monsieur Ibrahim, Moses gradually absorbs the grocer’s simple, relevant musings on life. Claiming that his wisdom stems solely from his Koran, the grocer in reality just fuses some of its teachings with his lived experience in a loving tone. To Moses—affectionately nicknamed “Momo” by the grocer—these easily digestible morsels make much more sense than his father’s harangues. The novella documents a conversion narrative, as Moses thus symbolically replaces his father’s books—legal treatises—with a homespun version of the Koran.

Moses and Monsieur Ibrahim’s friendship becomes a father-son bond when Monsieur Ibrahim legally adopts the parentless boy. Taking in his adoptive father’s teachings during their eastward journey, Moses consciously recognizes that he is happy for the first time in his life. Amid nascent feelings of joy, he experiences the healing power of mystical dance, first with Monsieur Ibrahim, then again with the grocer’s best friend Monsieur Abdullah. Upon returning to Paris to find that he’s inherited Monsieur Ibrahim’s estate along with his most treasured asset of all, his Koran, Momo takes on Monsieur Ibrahim’s old role as the Rue Bleue’s only “Arab” and changes his name to Mohammed. Whether his “conversion” from Judaism to Islam stems from genuine religious sentiment is immaterial, as the unconditional love, lifelong support, and gems of wisdom Moses receives through Monsieur Ibrahim revolutionize his life and provide him with an enduring spiritual framework in which to thrive.

Isolation and Solidarity

All of Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran’s characters exist in isolation. Scarred by maternal abandonment early in life and plagued by his ongoing quotidian existence in gloomy quarters with his depressive, stingy, emotionally unavailable father, young Moses spends his free time alone, doing his father’s errands and preparing their supper. Seldom do the two of them speak, and when they do, Moses is often unfavorably compared to his fictional older brother Popol. Similarly, the lonely, widowed grocer Monsieur Ibrahim works nonstop from 8 a.m. until midnight seven days per week, rarely budging from his stool. Moses’s father, whose family perished during the Holocaust and whose wife left him, spends his days defeated by grief and loss, feelings that are exacerbated when the law firm he works for fires him. The father’s inability to heal from his generational and personal trauma pervades his life, to the point where he abandons Moses and takes his own life.

Only Moses and Monsieur Ibrahim transcend isolation. At the novella’s onset, Moses demonstrates a misguided capacity for human intimacy in seeking out sex workers, more out of a dire need for affection than due to sexual precocity. Later, Moses and Monsieur Ibrahim are drawn out of isolation by their unlikely friendship that later evolves into a father-son relationship. Moses and the grocer intuit that the cure to their isolation is solidarity, each driven either by a conscious decision or by the lessons of Monsieur Ibrahim’s Koran playing themselves out at the hand of a mysterious force.

The novella’s message is simple, valorizing a community among peoples traditionally at odds—here, Jews and Muslims are juxtaposed almost like another proverbial odd pair, cats and dogs. It is important to note that the though characters at the center of the novel are minorities in majority-white and Christian France, the novella never addresses discrimination they face at the hands of this dominant culture. As Monsieur Ibrahim and Moses grow closer and closer, the grocer passes on his life’s legacy to the young boy, who eventually heals, enjoys a relationship—albeit of an odd nature—with his mother, and has a family of his own.

Misleading Appearances

Moses passes from childhood to young adulthood when he realizes that things aren’t necessarily what they seem. For example, Moses lives on the Rue Bleue, a street that isn’t blue. He visits sex workers on the Rue de Paradis, which, despite the momentary human connection and physical relief he experiences there, doesn’t quite live up to typical conceptions of paradise. And, when he forms a friendship with Monsieur Ibrahim, he learns that his street’s only “Arab”—the French word designating a neighborhood grocery—is not actually an Arab.

While these examples open Moses’s eyes, more strikingly profound lessons follow. As the nascent friendship grows between Monsieur Ibrahim, an older Muslim man, and Moses, a young Jewish boy—characters Schmitt specifically chooses to seemingly be a most unlikely pair—Moses is astonished to find his preconceptions routinely dismantled. Instead, he sees similarities between Muslims and Jews, which though surprising to the child should not strike adult readers as shocking, given that Islam stems from Judaic Abrahamic tradition. Cementing this connection is the fact that both protagonists bear the names of Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and Moses.

At roughly the same time that Moses begins a cross-cultural friendship culminating in unconditional love, he reunites with his mother. He has grown up believing his father’s story that she heartlessly abandoned him early in his life, but upon re-meeting her after his father’s suicide, Moses gets her side of events, which differs from that related by his father. Armed with the wisdom that appearances and long-held narratives can deceive, Moses forgives his mother and accepts her into his life as part of his healing and maturation process.