When I was living in community with homeless people at the St Francis
Catholic Worker House on the north side of Chicago and teaching at an
alternative school for returning high school dropouts on the grand
salary of $12,000 a year, a few people would ask me what was the use
of it all.
Did I think my meager act of solidarity was going to solve poverty?
Did I think helping a few former gangbangers get their GEDs was moving
us any closer to educational equality?
I didn’t have satisfactory answers to their questions. Guilt no longer
motivated me, not since college. My illusions of saving the world were
given up soon after.
So why did I do it?
The simple answer was this – I felt like I was meant to. I felt like,
inch by inch, this was what life was about.
And the more I asked other people who were living lives of service why
they did it, I found a similar answer. It was as if many of us were
motivated by an invisible force – one both inside of us and far beyond
us – that we all felt but few of us could put in words.
I had no language for it until I re-engaged the tradition of my
ancestors, Islam, and sat down with its scripture.
In the Holy Qur’an, God tells us that He created Adam (both the first
human and the first Prophet according to Muslim tradition) with His
breath, and made Adam His abd and khalifa – His servant and
representative – on Earth, giving him responsibility for stewarding
Creation.
Then God called the Angels forth and asked them to honor Adam and his
role as vicegerent on Earth. The Angels pointed out Adam’s flaws. They
said, “Will You put there a being who will work mischief on the Earth
and shed blood, while we sing Your glories and exalt Your utter holiness?”
And God responded, “I know what you do not know.” (Qur’an 2:30)
God gave humankind’s first representative a giant responsibility, and
believed in our ability to accomplish the task, even in the face of
the Angels’ questions. (This is why I, as a Muslim, feel a strong
religious connection to Martin Luther King’s line “The arc of the
moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I believe that
line contains within it an affirmation of the great goodness that God
gave humankind with His breath.)
What did it mean to be God’s servant and representative? I found the
answer to that question in another piece of Muslim scripture, one that
pertains to Muhammad (who Muslims believe is God’s final Prophet). The
scripture says of Muhammad: “We did not send you but as a special
mercy upon all the worlds.” (Qur’an 21:71)
Here it was for me, clear as day. Prophet Adam was given a task for
what to do– to steward Creation. Prophet Muhammad was given direction
for how to do it – by being a mercy. And all of us were given the
breath of God, and the gift of fitra: a natural inclination towards
the good.
In the Qur’an was an articulation that confirmed what I had long felt
in my being. The message is simple, the path is plain: serve others.
It is what we were created for.
(for a longer explanation of the central role of mercy in Islam, see
http://www.nawawi.org/downloads/article1.pdf )
Ismailimail 