الأستاذ محمود محمد طه لأمنا آمنة: هذا بعض ما أرسلتني لأحضره، فهو منك و إليك (صور)

Quote: In 1953 or 1954, Amna Lutfi and the children were visiting Rufa'a and calamity struck. Muhammad was down at the river with the Rufa'a boys. They were all village boys who could swim, but he had been in Omdurman, playing in parks and going to cinemas. He went into the river anyway, and drowned. Taha was not with the family, but someone came and told Amna: An old lady came and sat with me. She brought some goat's milk, the best thing, she said, for this kind of tragedy. They searched for Muhammad, they never found him. They found someone else who had drowned, a clerk, drowned in his clothes and his watch. But that one was not found. Amna lay on the bed and the old lady held her while her sisters ran to the river to look. The search lasted three days, but everyone noticed her patience. She did not cry, she told the people who cried: "Don't cry. God ordains patience, and that's that" . Taha came down on the train the next day. He did not show his emotion either. This ability to utter inscrutable pieties in the worst of times is a striking feature of some funerals of Muslim children, and one which was admired by all the Lutfi women . Taha only stayed in Rufa'a for three days and then went back to the city to carry on with his work. Amna stayed on with her daughter and her enormous patience. Amna had another daughter that year, called Sumaya. But the death of Muhammad seemed to mark a turning point in the family. Taha's feelings about the incident were not clear even to his contemporaries, and the death of a child carries too many meanings for anyone to speculate about its effects. But Taha was more and more often away, and eventually moved out of Omdurman, sending Amna back to Rufa'a to stay. Over the next ten years they saw little of each other, as Taha devoted his life to his ideas.