Keep your eyes open
That’s what the God avatar told Joan on this week’s Joan of Arcadia. What he meant was that we are responsible for stepping in and helping out when others need us to, even if they don’t realize they need us to. We are responsible for recognizing that something is wrong. It’s why Kevin retains some guilt over his accident and why Joan has guilt over Judith’s hospitalization; both characters could have done more to prevent those outcomes.
That is not to say there is no such thing as personal responsibility, just that personal responsibility for an action often extends to more than one person. John Donne said it when he wrote that no man was an island. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf said it tonight when he advised us to consider every action we take because if we do something that causes someone to react, we are responsible for the reaction.
And that is why we, the Muslim community of the world, need to do more than we are doing.
The Prophet Muhammad warned us to beware of extremism in religion as it destroyed the people who came before us. There is just as much extremism in too much religion as there is in too little; those who have too little lose their connection with God, and those who have too much falsely justify every wrong action as being the will of God. There is a story about the Prophet Muhammad during the Miraj; the angel Gabriel offered him a glass of water, a glass of milk, and a glass of wine, and he chose the milk. When asked about it later, he said the wine was too rich and the water too poor, so he chose the one in the middle, the milk. Beware the extremism.
Shaykh Hamza said tonight, “We are losing the message of Islam, which is mercy.” And he quoted the Prophet Muhammad as saying, “You will not believe unless you have mercy,” and further explained the Prophet did not mean only mercy to other Muslims but universal mercy to all humanity.
We have, as a religious community, lost our mercy, I think. For every scholar or Muslim representative who condemns the Beslan seige or the beheadings in Iraq, there are two more who hedge and fuss and find a way to justify it all. Suicide bombings and insurgency are not the Islamic way, and we have to do something about it. That is our responsibility. We cannot continue to pretend there’s a good reason or it’s okay because it’s happening in Palestine or Iraq. “The essence of this religion,” said Shaykh Hamza, “is to break the cycles of violence.” Redress is permitted in Islam, but forgiveness is encouraged, and he who forgives today will receive forgiveness from Allah later.
I don’t expect this viewpoint will be very popular at the local masjid, but that’s okay. Shaykh Hamza said something else last night, too: “Our prophet did not stand by his tribe. He stood by truth. … We have an absolute obligation to speak the truth.” That was the theme of his talk — truth at all costs, regardless of how much it might upset us. And the truth of this matter is that we have to step up, we have to speak out, we have to stop tacitly encouraging terrorists by refusing to say out loud what we all know: there is no justification for what they are doing. There is no Islam in what they are doing.
Keep your eyes open, y’all.