There is a rather crude email joke that’s been circulating for the last couple of years. In the joke, there are two people talking. One says to the other, “Recently, in Muslim Land, 100 000 Muslims were killed, as well as one dentist.”
The other person, surprised, says, “Why the one dentist?”
The message here is that often, in the media’s quest to sensationalize the magnitude of a calamity, we as viewers lose sight of the individuals that are affected by that event. As human beings, we can’t deal with numbers that large-what does it mean to have millions of people affected by a flood? What does it mean to have a fourth of a country under water? We can’t wrap our minds around such numbers. It’s like asking someone to count all the hairs on someone’s head. In my more charitable moments, I think that the media tries to quote these statistics so that people can get an idea of the scope of a calamity. In my less charitable moments, however, I feel that this is just a way to stimulate an already desensitized viewership.
Now that Mustafa has gone to Pakistan, I’ve suddenly understood what it really means to feel for people affected by a disaster. “May God protect Mustafa from anything harmful, and bring him back to us safely,” is the prayer I made two nights ago, after taraweeh. Suddenly, I realized that there are millions of people who are staying in the same place, but are much less equipped to deal with the situation than Mustafa. Mustafa will leave; they will stay. Mustafa has food (of a sort!) and water; they have nothing. Mustafa has shelter; they remain exposed to the elements. I’m sure I knew this beforehand, but it really didn’t impact me until I had talked to Mustafa and heard what he had gone through, until I had heard about his fast with little water in forty-seven degrees Celsius, until I had heard about little children crying in hospitals, until I had heard his own voice describing things none of the things I had heard on the news had any impact on me.
So when we think about the people who are suffering, not just in Pakistan, but all around the world, it’s important that we remember that they are human beings just like us and think of them as a brother, a sister, a mother, a father. To paraphrase what Shaykh Hamza said in the lecture, Men and Women, the Prophet (SA) was someone who recognized people as sharing in a common humanity. When the Prophet (SA) compared the Muslim Ummah to a single body, then he (SA) said that if a single part of the body hurts, the whole body hurt. The emphasis was on the collective Ummah sharing in the pain of the individual.
In the Qur’an, the ayah in Surah Ma’idah also talks about how if someone kills one soul, it is as if he has killed all of mankind, and whoever saves one soul, it is as if he has saved all of mankind. By taking care of the individual, we are taking care of humanity; even more importantly, by paying attention to the individuals, we can preserve our own hope. This is not to say, of course, that we don’t need to do things in a systematic way that takes into consideration the scope of what is happening. Our motivation, however, has to remain with the mother who has given birth without any medical care, and with the baby who has just been born. That’s how we can remain hopeful even in the face of so much suffering-because, by the Grace of God, we can alleviate the pain of a few people, even if we cannot change the condition of everyone.
May God bring Mustafa back to us safely, and take care of the other Mustafa’s, the Ameer’s and all of the other human beings all over the world.
-Ameer Farooq
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