Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

This first-person bildungsroman, or coming of age narrative, opens with a simple, declarative, one-sentence paragraph: “When I was eleven years old, I broke open my piggy bank and went to see the whores” (5). Given that Schmitt initially composed the work as a play, one can imagine its narrator Moses—a young adult looking back on his youth—offering a deadpan delivery of this striking fact amid the audience’s surprised laughter. This comical introductory sentence introduces the lighthearted tone that Schmitt sustains throughout the narrative, even when addressing traumatic elements.

In the following paragraphs, Schmitt establishes Moses’s cultural identity by using blatant anti-Semitic tropes and viciously bigoted stereotypes. The novella paints the boy’s father as a money-obsessed Jewish man, invoking one of the most common derogatory images of Jewish people in this man consumed with greed. The boy’s resentment of his father comes across in his description of the piggy bank his father selected: It is “the color of vomit” (5) and has a slit allowing money to enter but not leave—details that sum up the father’s attitude towards money and life. Moses’s father coldly rejects his son, interacting with him primarily to scolds him for money that’s gone missing.

The narrative is delivered in Moses’s spoken, familiar linguistic register. Through a stream of sentences beginning with the word “so,” Moses delivers an account of the problems he regularly confronts through a syntax notable in its orality. Here, the anaphoric repetition of the phrase “it wasn’t enough that” (5) is a distorted quotation of the Passover anthem Dayenu—which celebrates God’s grace and miracles with the repeated phrase “it would have been enough.”

Moses’s daily existence is devoid of pleasure. Abandoned by his mother, Moses also suffers the consequences of his father’s generational trauma—the novella justifies the father’s behavior as the result of his family having been killed during the Holocaust, though in real life, many death camp survivors instead nurtured and cultivated love, familial bonds, and community. Given this emotional lack, it’s not surprising that Moses’s sexual initiation is transactional, devoid of intimacy, and socially awkward: He must convince a sex worker that he is old enough for her services, and then realizes that he’s forgotten the customary tip of a small gift.

The narrative’s extremes in depicting Moses’s father recur in its portrayal of the grocer Monsieur Ibrahim, who is an angelic, wise, infinitely patient, and generally flawless man. The street’s only “Arab” is already known a sage, due to his stillness, his permanent smile, and his habit of speaking infrequently and meaningfully. Seldom leaving his stool, the grocer is the antithesis of frenetic Parisians—a marker of his great understanding. While the novella’s treatment of Moses’s father is one form of racism, its treatment of Monsieur Ibrahim is another, a form typically called benevolent prejudice. Monsieur Ibrahim is so unrealistically good that he is barely a person; his wisdom is mystical and comes from some undefined “East” where people know ancient truths Westerners no longer have access to; he never experiences or expresses distress at being a minority in a White country; he has no life or interests of his own, but instead exists solely to guide the main character.

Not surprisingly, meeting Monsieur Ibrahim changes the course of Moses’s life. Monsieur Ibrahim can somehow intuit the unseen—he is mysteriously privy to undisclosed secrets about Moses’s life—and to discuss delicate matters in a kind, non-judgmental manner, Moses’s newfound friend serves as the perfect antidote to his cold, disparaging father.

Neither of Moses’s parents is named. At the beginning of the novella, this represents the fact that they cause him confusion and distress, ultimately failing him. Later in the story, when Monsieur Ibrahim teaches Moses to forgive his parents, the more mature and insightful Moses leaves out their names to signify letting go of the past and moving forward.

In juxtaposition, the names of the work’s protagonists call to mind Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. Through Moses and Monsieur Ibrahim’s names, Schmitt underscores the common root of their religions. However, though Schmitt elevates Monsieur Ibrahim by attributing to his character elements of his biblical forefather Abraham, Schmitt inverts the biblical story of Moses—which is about reclaiming identity rather than rejecting it—in his namesake character. In the Talmud, the patriarch Abraham—whose name in Islam is Ibrahim—is the father of Ishmael, whose birth marked a split from Judaism and the founding of Islam. The first to enter into the covenant with God, Abraham is the spiritual forebearer of the three religions; similarly, Monsieur Ibrahim, in adopting Moses, becomes the boy’s spiritual beacon. Conversely, unlike the biblical Moses, whose mother gave him up in a desperate attempt to save him from an Egyptian law to kill all firstborn male Jewish babies, the novella’s Moses loses his mother to her selfish desires—she leaves Moses’s father to pursue love and does not take the boy with her. The biblical Moses was raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the palace until he learned about and embraced his Jewish roots. Reclaiming his identity as one of the oppressed Hebrews, Moses led his people out of slavery to Jerusalem. However, the protagonist Moses after being taken in and nurtured by the Other, refuses his Jewish identity, adopting an Arabic name that, significantly, isn’t even the Islamic version of Moses (which would be Musa).

Momo’s transition from Moses to Mohammed means embracing Monsieur Ibrahim’s teachings, which putatively derive from the Koran. Troublingly, Schmitt argues that completely rejecting his cultural background takes Moses from a difficult childhood to a sustainably happy, well-adjusted adulthood. By giving Moses words of wisdom, horizon-expanding travel, an inheritance, and a Koran, Monsieur Ibrahim becomes the ultimate patriarch.