Stories rooted in Islamic values, such as compassion and social justice, that Muslim children grow up with are more relevant amid a rising tide of Islamophobia and promote a vision of peaceful coexistence
Years before Islamophobia became a fact of life and tarring Muslims with the same brush par for the course, I grew up in the 1990s on stories that drove home the foundational Islamic value of compassion. The stories were an important part of training children. My favourite of these stories was of the woman who would curse and throw garbage at the Prophet Muhammad every time he passed by. When the routine suddenly stopped one day, the Prophet made it a point to see the woman and found she was sick.
Garbage-throwing was nothing in comparison to the mutilation Hind, who was the Prophet’s opponent before converting to Islam, subjected the body of his uncle. The prophet forgave Hind along with several others who wronged him. Compassion is the moral of these stories.
The story of African slave-turned-muezzin Bilal illustrated another foundational Islamic idea of social justice. Bilal was among the first converts to Islam and a prominent member of the nascent Muslim community. Islam’s egalitarian message first resonated with marginalised people such as women and slaves in Arabia, which was then infamous for entrenched notions of ethnic and tribal superiority. It challenged inequalities determined by kinship, tribal affiliation, and wealth.
Against All Odds
Islam’s propagation prompted fierce opposition from the elites, including Bilal’s owner, Umayya, who would torture his slave by placing a rock on his chest to have him renounce Islam. Bilal was known for his beautiful voice. He had the distinction of giving the first public call to Muslim prayer. Bilal, who married an Arab woman from an important clan, was among those closest to the Prophet, making him the symbol of social justice.
Bilal’s story illustrates the core Islamic mandate of a society that takes care of its weak and treats them with respect. The honour given to Bilal of making the first azan symbolised the uprooting of the oppressive power and social structure. Kinship or lineal descent, called nasab, determined an individual’s low or high social status under this structure.
The Prophet said all humans have descended from Adam and Eve, and there is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, a non-Arab over an Arab, a white person over a black person, a black person over a white person. The Prophet urged his followers to treat others justly so that no one would be unjust to them. ‘You will neither inflict nor suffer inequity…you have certain rights over your women, but they also have rights over you. …Treat your women well and be kind to them…’
Univeral Values
The story of the Prophet’s employer and later wife, Khadijah, underscores the importance of gender equality. Impressed by the Prophet’s reputation, Khadijah employed him to take care of her business spread across Mecca, Syria, and Yemen. Khadijah was widowed twice before proposing marriage to the Prophet. The Prophet lived mostly a monogamous life. He was 25 at the time of his first marriage to Khadija, who had children from her previous marriages. The union lasted for over 25 years. In a society where polygamy was a norm, Khadijah remained his only wife until her death.
The prophet only confided in Khadija and her Christian cousin when he is believed to have begun receiving revelations. Many early converts to Islam were women, thanks to the idea of equality, when the Prophet began preaching two years after he started receiving revelations. The Prophet’s message was revolutionary for its time. The women got the right to acquire property that eluded their European counterparts for centuries.
The Prophet’s saying that ‘go as far as China if you need to acquire knowledge’ underlined the importance of universal education. He declared education compulsory for women and men when the right to educate oneself, for instance, in India, was a privilege only for the priestly class. ‘Seeking knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim,’ said the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia when he challenged entrenched ideas of inequality.
The Prophet ended a cycle of reprisals and constant warfare to usher in unity, order, peace, and justice by uniting warring tribes, giving them a sense of community. He laid the foundation for the Islamic Golden Age, with the pursuit of knowledge becoming the key to the meteoric rise of the Arabs.
The Prophet loved animals. He is once believed to have cut a sleeve of his coat to ensure that a cat napping on his arm was not disturbed while he had to rush for prayers. The prophet is said to have told a woman she would find a place in paradise despite being ‘sinful and evil’ for saving a dying dog and giving it water.
The Perversion
Until a perverse form of jihad used against the USSR in Afghanistan backfired on the West and became the only thing defining over a billion Muslims to fuel Islamophobia, for real Muslims, the idea meant a struggle with the biggest being against the evil within. The words for fighting or war in Arabic are qital and harb. Jihad appears in the Quran 41 times, while dissuasion from fighting appears 70 times.
The United States introduced its perverse form in the late 1970s to fight communism. It pumped millions of dollars into textbooks full of violent images and teachings for Afghan schools. According to The Washington Post, the primers ‘filled with talk of jihad’ featured ‘drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers, and mines.’ They served as ‘the Afghan school system’s core curriculum’ and even the Taliban used them, steeping ‘a generation in violence.’
Islam’s humanising elements have not disappeared overnight. It is just that geopolitics, since the 1980s accelerated the Muslim dehumanisation project. As Sophia Rose Arjana shows in her book, Muslims in the Western Imagination, there has been a long history of imaginary Muslim monsters who have aided the dehumanisation of the Muslim other.
The project conveniently ignores the glorious legacy of spiritual Islam, Sufism, and true heirs to the prophets. The Islamic world’s ‘deficiencies’ are used as a stick to beat Muslims with, while positive examples from Muslim countries such as Indonesia are conveniently ignored. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country, where 12.9 percent of the world’s Muslims live. It is secular with a heavy Hindu influence, exemplifying its pluralism.
The influence is disproportionate to the number, 1.7 percent of Hindus in Indonesia. Indonesia’s national airline is named after the Hindu god Vishnu’s vehicle, Garuda. Its currency notes once carried another Hindu deity, Ganesh’s picture. Ramayana and Mahabharata have a deep imprint on Indonesian culture. A Saraswati statue stands outside the Indonesian embassy in the world’s most important capital: Washington,DC.
