“Look to Those Who Have Less"
By Ingrid Mattson
A talk by Dr. Ingrid Mattson, President, The Islamic Society of North America (www.isna.net) and Director of the Macdonald Center for Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations, Hartford Seminary (www.hartsem.edu) for the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition of Minnesota’s “Day on the Hill,” February 3, 2009.
Good morning; peace be unto you.
I would like to thank Brian Rusche for inviting me here today to witness this truly awe-inspiring gathering of religious leaders from across the state of Minnesota.
I want to let you in on a little secret: this does not happen in every state!
The very existence of the JRLC says to me that there is something a little different about Minnesota.
Your successes in advocating for policies and regulations that advance human dignity and the common good are exemplary – and I hope that religious leaders in other states will learn from you.
I was told that the theme for this year’s “Day on the Hill,” is “led by prophets.” Now, although in the Islamic tradition, the term “prophet” is restricted to the person who transmits revelation, Muslims can certainly embrace the notion that those who cry out for justice on behalf of the weak, the suffering and the oppressed have taken upon themselves the socially transformative role of the prophets.
Certainly we need conviction to embark on a major undertaking like the elimination of poverty by 2020; and it does not hurt to have faith – but it should be enough for us to know our history to say: it can be done.
To some, it might seem impossible, but things that seemed impossible to others in times not too distant have come to pass.
I cannot count, for example, the number of Americans I heard who stated after the election of Barack Obama that they did not believe it would ever be possible in their lifetime for a Black man to be elected president of the United States.
But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned this – and his dream gave us a mission, and this mission was accomplished – praise be to God.
We can dream big – and if our dreams are to follow the prophetic path of caring for the orphan, the widow, the sick, the poor – then surely our dreams will take flight and, blessed by God, will be realized with patient, persistent, courageous work.
Now, there might be some who would say: but poverty is a more complex problem than racism; after all, racism is an attitude of one group towards another, and attitudes, although difficult to change, can be changed without altering fundamental economic and social relationships. Well, I think people who would say that would be wrong – the American civil war, and perhaps, even more, the establishment of Jim Crow demonstrate to us that racism is not just about attitudes.
Still, we can take another example of a major change in our social and economic relationships that occurred only in the last hundred years, and that some people felt would be impossible: this change is the abolition of child labor.
It took almost a hundred years after the first minimum age laws were passed in Massachusetts for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to establish federal limits on minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children. In much of the nineteenth century, if you had told mill owners, plantation managers, and even many parents that justice demanded that those children be free of their labor and had a right to a free public education until age sixteen, they would have thought you were crazy. Their families would go hungry if their children did not work! Mills would close if they had to employ adults for all their labor needs! And how could society bear the cost of educating all those children?
Yet, minimum age labor laws and compulsory education have meant an increase in the standard of living for all of us – there is much less poverty in our society because of these laws.
I hope that one day soon, when we travel to India or Pakistan or Egypt or China, that in those places too we will no longer see impoverished children weaving carpets in dusty rooms or roasting corn on street corners – and we certainly need to examine our consumption patterns to make sure that we have not simply transferred our child labor problem to other places.
But we at least have to be happy that we as a nation made a decision that children have a right to an education and to be free of hard and tiring work, and that we put in place the resources needed to accomplish this vision.
There are many obstacles to having the privileged to cede any of their benefits to advantage others: certainly simple greed is one problem. And all of us are privileged and all of us are greedy. The Prophet Muhammad said, “If the son of Adam had two mountains of gold, he would want another.” We always want more. However, there is a treatment – not a cure, but a treatment – for greed. The treatment, the Prophet Muhammad said, is this: “When you see someone who has more, look to someone who has less.”
Looking to someone who has less is an active movement: we turn to them: we see them, we choose to see them and their relative deprivation to us, just as we feel relative deprivation to the one who has more than us. Looking toward the one who has less pushes back our greed, grounds us in a more realistic view of our relative privilege, and engenders empathy. This is one reason why we must continue to build communities that embrace not only racial and ethnic diversity, but economic diversity, so that we must see each other.
But there is another obstacle that prevents the privileged from sharing some of what we have with those who have less – and this obstacle is, perhaps, more relevant for policy discussions whose foundation should be ethics, and that is ingratitude – or perhaps, in the language of spirituality, “heedlessness.” We are ungrateful, or heedless, or, in the characterization of Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, an “unconscious civilization” when, among other things, we fail to acknowledge the extent to which we ourselves have benefited from social programs put in place many years earlier.
We forget, or ignore the fact, for example, that we had a free public education as children, that we survived childhood because we have been drinking pure water and eating clean food because of public health measure, and that we continue to benefit from the public works, health and safety services that are provided by the all members of society – including the most poor. It is not only “the poor” who are in need of our collective resources and support. Just go to Mexico City and see how the wealthy are terrified and terrorized by crime and kidnapping, or go to Beijing and see that the wealthy have to breathe the same polluted air as the poor people.
Certainly it is possible, if one has enough wealth, to barricade oneself from the poor and needy (or buy a respirator to filter toxic air), but there is no wall high enough to block the sight of the most Wise Judge – God Almighty – and certainly it is the Creator who has offered us health, wealth and security, not so we can fritter all of these things on goods and activities that stupefy our minds, debase our souls and pollute the planet, but to be good stewards acting on His behalf.
This is not, however, just a question of ethics and theology – of being good stewards of the earth and showing gratitude to God. It is really about our bottom line as human beings: are we willing to accept policies that mean that some children will have to make do with two meals a day and not three? We do not want to see children starving, but will we accept that a little boy in our child’s class experiences a slight gnawing hunger each and every day? We do not want to see elderly people huddled in the streets, dying of utter neglect, but are we willing to let our neighbor’s blood pressure rise higher and higher for an extra week, or two, or a month, because she cannot afford medical treatment just now? We do not want to see the disabled confined endlessly in run-down institutions, but are we willing to see a young paraplegic stuck at home, missing education classes and work opportunities because he no longer has adequate transportation?
We are told we have to make “painful” cuts to our social services, but really, let’s be honest, who is going to be in pain? Is it us? Or is it them?
The Prophet Muhammad said that the noblest battle is to speak a word of truth to an unjust ruler. We are our own rulers in this country. It is time to speak the truth about our own injustice and then, to rectify it.
There is a beautiful story from early Islamic history about the ability of a community to survive the most difficult of times when they consider themselves one body. This happened in the mid-seventh century, during the caliphate of Umar when there was a terrible drought in Arabia. The drought hit the Bedouin hardest, because they lived a subsistence lifestyle, and when the watering holes and thorny shrubs of the desert that sustained their camels dried up, they had nothing to eat or drink. The suffering was intense during what came to be called “The Year of Ashes.”
Starving and emaciated, thousands of Bedouin came from all directions to the small city-state of Medina to find help. The caliph Umar went to the outskirts of the city to see what the Bedouin were experiencing. He found terrible suffering there. He approached one woman who was seemed to have something to cook, and found that she was boiling a leather halter, hoping to dull the hunger of her children. Others had crushed dried bones and were mixing them with water.
Umar went back to the city and wrote to the governors of the provinces: “The Bedouin have fled to us because their land cannot support them. They must get help, help. . . .” He repeated this until he filled the page; perhaps he wrote it two hundred times on the page. All of the governors wrote back promising to help, but in case the provisions did not come arrive, in case there was no “extra” food to give, Umar made another decision: he said that each family in the city would be required to lodge one of the refugees because “two will not die from what is enough to feed one.”
Umar took drastic measures to save the dying refugees for two reasons: because he insisted on witnessing their suffering – and not ignoring it or turning away from it – and because he considered the people to comprise one body, that collectively had enough resources to sustain everyone.
We live in difficult times, but surely the sacrifices we are being asked to make as taxpayers to extend some dignity and life to our neighbors is not extreme. It is your task as religious leaders to encourage your communities to keep seeing the poor and the needy – to not look away and neglect them. Then it is your task as citizens to take that knowledge to advocate for policies that will dignify and elevate all of us as a people.
May God bless you in this noble struggle.
