Ingrid Mattson – RISTalks Living the Ten Commandments Purpose RIS Canada 2010
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In the name of God,
the merciful, the compassionate.
I I wanna begin by
talking a little bit about the 2 people
who will be speaking after me.
And I know you have your bios and
you're gonna hear about them,
But one of the things that happens in
conventions like this is that
it's a wonderful way to, learn a great
deal
about a topic,
but but I hope that for many of
us, we take it as the beginning of
learning
and not the end of that of learning.
And everyone who's
who has spoke to you
this weekend and who will speak
to you has learned from other people
and has learned not just by by listening,
but also by spending
significant time
reading their books and articles and contemplating them.
And
I I wanna take this time to acknowledge
my intellectual debt
to the 2 men who are speaking after
me.
We know that the prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi
wa sallam peace be upon him said,
whoever does not thank people does not thank
God.
Gratitude
is one of the most important
characteristics
of a Muslim.
Muslim. And we all you know, intellectual gratitude
and intellectual indebtedness
is a great debt to have. It's it's
one of the good debts. Most debts are
bad.
But we should,
you know, continue to expand our learning, not
just by listening,
because it's it's a little bit easy come,
easy go. But please go back
and do some more learning.
I just want to,
you know, highlight some things about these people.
Doctor Ahmed, I first encountered his work when
I was a student at the University of
Chicago.
And even then, his legacy as an interpreter
of the Islamic legal tradition loomed large.
I was later blessed to be involved with
the Nowhere Foundation,
which was established to allow more people to
benefit from doctor's Ahmed scholar doctor Ahmed's scholarship
when he returned from Chicago after a lengthy
period of teaching abroad.
Doctor Ahmed has taught us a great deal
about the importance of authentic
culture
as a vehicle for religious values,
about the necessity of digging deeply into the
history of minority
and Western Muslim cult communities
like the Chinese Muslims,
the Andalusians,
and early American Muslims
to know our roots,
to be grateful to our ancestors
who struggled and sacrificed
in the face of enormous obstacles,
and to see how they survived
or failed based on their abilities to distinguish
the important from the trivial
and always to be open to witnessing God's
grace and mercy
in unfamiliar
and sometimes frighteningly
different surroundings.
As for doctor Saul, as a Canadian living
in the United States in the 19 nineties,
always looking for
a way to tune in to CBC Radio.
Now with with,
streaming radio, it's not difficult,
but it wasn't available then. And I would
always visit bookstores when I would come back
to Canada.
I remember picking up and reading his book,
The Unconscious
Civilization,
and feeling such a sense of relief that
there
were intellectuals
who were still digging into the facade of
this,
freedom presenting,
unbridled
capitalism as freedom.
His later book on equilibrium
has had a major impact on my conviction
that balance is one of the most important
principles
in managing and integrating the various tools and
sources of Islamic ethics
for practical application.
And this is something that is very relevant
to this panel tonight
as we talk about the purposes or the
goals of the sharia,
which are multiple and need to be held
in balance.
Not last and certainly not least, but enough
for tonight at least,
is a mention of A Fair Country,
a recent book of his that is a
marvelous look at the obscured
and denied, but never nevertheless
authentic Aboriginal foundation of the Canadian ethos.
And, I think there are a lot of
lessons there for the Muslim community, including
for the American Muslim community as we
try to remember and understand both the denied
and often covered up foundation of the
American
Aboriginal ethos that underlies some of the
American Aboriginal
ethos
that underlies some of the best of the
notions of
community in the United States.
So really it is,
I want you to pay attention
to the fact that,
the what you will hear tonight is just
a small bit
of a enormous
legacy, intellectual legacy that both of these men
have produced and God willing will continue to
produce, and I hope that you continue
to try to learn from them
by,
reading their books and discussing them with others
in your community.
Now,
my theme in in the short time I
have tonight is simply this,
that it is absolutely
important
for a Muslim
to adopt multiple frames of analysis
or multiple perspectives
simultaneously
on any issue that we face that is
a human issue, an issue of human concern.
There is never one model,
one frame of analysis Well,
even
if we look at the human
Well, even if we look at the human
condition from a scientific model,
which
those who do not have a, religious worldview
might say is is the only real perspective
on the human
reality.
So even if we took a scientific perspective,
what does science say about what it means
to be human?
Well, does that not depend on what kind
of scientist, you will ask.
An endocrinologist,
a geneticist,
a neurologist,
Each one of them can map out and
analyze
a complex
physical system,
their function and their dysfunctions,
so that any even small injury or illness
in that one system can lead to the
total destruction of a human being.
You can die from a dysfunction
in one of
to constituting a whole functioning body.
And then if we add the social sciences,
sociology,
psychology,
anthropology,
we see more of the complexity,
not just of the human body, but of
the human experience.
And still, it's not enough to show us
what it means to be human.
We can add poetry
and art
and literature, but still do we have the
whole picture?
So when we look at something like the
goals of the Sharia,
this is simply
one of the frames
by which
Muslim jurists try to
organize
and manage
different understanding
how to apply our principles to different aspects
of human life.
More than anything,
how do we pay attention
to those things that are important?
You know that, for example,
we have,
according to,
our scholars,
5 or 6 purposes
of the sacred law,
protection of religion,
life,
property,
intellect,
family,
and then some add honor, which I would
rather
translate as dignity, human dignity.
Now you could say as a Muslim, well,
you don't need to look through all of
those perspectives.
You could just look at them through the
perspective of religion. After all, are these not
all religious concerns? So
The the reason we do that is so
that we can pay attention to those concerns.
Because if we only say, well,
everything is important under religion, it's very easy
to overlook
or give undue priority
to certain issues or certain aspects of what
it means to be human and neglect another
aspect.
For example, I'll give you a a a
very practical example
that
that I know of.
And,
you know, it confused me a great deal
when I worked with Afghan refugees
to encounter,
you know, religious
Afghan scholars
or at least religious leaders,
banning them from education, banning them from work.
And the reasoning was that,
sometimes it was too dangerous for women to
be in the street. There's political insecurity, so
they needed to protect their life.
Right? They needed to protect their life by
keeping them in the house. This would protect
their life. They would not be harmed in
the street.
And banning them from education,
well, because it's not
necessary
for the salvation
of of women to be
to have a higher education
and the risk
of,
of them neglecting family duties by being educated,
then they should be
banned from education, higher education. Of course, this
is a small
group in terms of population of those in
Afghanistan who believe this way, but they were
powerful and they really used religious language to
justify this.
But this is the nature of extremism. What
is the problem with the logic here?
Extremism
is is really a problem in in reasoning
very often.
It's logical extremism where you take one principle
or one factor
and you take it to its logical extreme
and neglect all other principles and priorities and
interests.
So for example,
we could say, yes, we want to preserve
life,
but
what about
the preservation of intellect
when many of these women who were confined
to their homes ended up having
major clinical depression because of being confined for
so long.
What about
the preservation of human dignity,
the ability of a human being
to express
their,
value
in public life to use the gifts, the
intellectual gifts they had, the gifts for service,
the gifts to give to the community.
What about the need to preserve
religion itself?
Because when religion is used as a
tool of control,
then people will turn against religion.
So this is a simple demonstration
of how the goals of the Sharia,
the the goals of the sacred law can
be used to try to bring back some
balance
as
communities are determining how they're going to,
order themselves and what kind of policies
they're going to determine.
Now
Well, these 6 5 or 6 goals of
the Sharia
are
an excellent mechanism
for helping us further our discussions,
a rational
basis for us to organize a conversation about
our policies and practices and institutions, we need
to understand that Muslim
reality of our situation,
the urgent needs that we face,
and continue to develop
additional models
or frames
of
bringing balance to our community.
For example, one of the things that we
don't see as a particular focus of attention
by being identified as a goal of the
sharia
is the need for privacy.
Now we could say that the need for
for privacy is something that we could subsume
under the need for honor or dignity,
But remember,
everything could be subsumed under the goal of
preserving religion.
The purpose is, the purpose of identifying
Mohammed
Hashim
Kamali,
professor
Kamali,
who
has written
Mohammed Hashim Kamali, professor Kamali,
who has written a number of books on
this subject, has identified
there is a pressing need for the protection
of privacy,
individual privacy from the intrusion of the state
in our time.
The ability of the state to intervene, and
and Chris Hedges mentioned this earlier tonight,
to to monitor
and surveil people in this time
is so
extraordinary
and of a nature far beyond anything in
human history before
that this is a new pressing urgent need.
And so as we talk about
whether it's public policies in a in a
Muslim majority country
or in the society in which we live,
we need to very seriously take this as
a as one of the goals of the
Sharia that we need to identify and filter.
And then another,
focus of attention which we could identify in
our time
as a goal of the Sharia, again, we
could subsume it under something else,
but is the to give special attention
to our experience as living creatures in a
world teeming with life.
From worms and minnows and crayfish to pigeons
and sparrows, geese and robins, squirrels and deer,
cats and chickens, donkeys and bears, dogs and
ducks,
what does it mean for me to be
a human
from the perspective of my relationship
to the cat sitting on my lap or
the chicken sitting on my plate and then
in my stomach?
What what does that mean?
Now, we could subsume this under the preservation
of life as one of the goals of
the Sharia, but again, do we need to
give it special attention
because of the urgency
of the matter, the fact that in our
time, there is a real,
very
imminent risk
of
the majority of species on the earth disappearing.
I would say that it requires
a new special urgency.
Now I want to draw your attention to
something.
When I mentioned these different
creatures and animals,
except for I noticed I had a little
bit of a kind of fishing bait theme
running at the beginning with worms and minnows
and crayfish.
But other than that, when I mentioned the
animals, I didn't categorize them in a way
that you might find
typical. I didn't say cats and dogs or
ducks and geese.
And I did that deliberately
because I wanna point out
and draw your attention to the fact that
our lives,
our world,
our human experience,
my human experience, your human experience
is not an Aristotelian
diorama
where we're all organized in these neat categories
that we encounter going from one room to
the other.
But we live in a web of complex,
continually
changing,
decidedly unorganized
relationships.
And the only way to deal with this,
the only good way to deal with this
is to be flexible,
nimble, to have a good humor,
a great sense of adventure,
and to constantly shift our perspective
from
how how does this look from the perspective
of me as a human?
What does this look from the perspective of
my relationship with animals?
What does this look from
the perspective of me as
an intelligent
thinking person,
as an individual?
So we keep shifting.
This may seem complicated. It may seem difficult.
It may seem unorganized, but I want to
suggest to you that this is in fact
the one of the messages that the Quran
gives us
by the medium
through which
it gives us its messages.
What do I mean by that? And we're
in Toronto, the city of the great Marshall
McLuhan,
who said the medium is the message.
Think about the Quran and how the Quran
is organized.
Some people, you know, non Muslims who first
read the Quran find it disorganized.
Why is that? Because the Quran is constantly
shifting perspective.
There's the grammatical shift of pronouns. Even god
speaks sometimes from the perspective of enah
and then god is being described.
So we have this it's called
It's a grammatical
or rhetorical device of shifting.
Stylistically,
the Quran shifts from a straightforward narrative
to a doxology,
to an evocative,
almost poetic
description of nature, to a legislative passage from
one to the other.
Description
of different figures,
people, and even animals as it describes a
scenario. For example, the beautiful passage in Surat
al Namal, the chapter of the ant,
which describes at the beginning the marshaling
of the prophet Suleiman, the prophet Solomon, his
troops, giving the impression of an impressive and
awesome military presence.
Then suddenly we're pulled into a completely different
perspective.
And the Quran says
at length when Solomon's army came to a
valley of ants, one of them cried, this
is the ant, hey, ants, get into your
houses
or else Solomon and his armies might crush
you and not even notice you.
This is this is extraordinary
because here here we are in the middle
of war.
War is about the relationship of humans to
others.
This political
demonstration of power,
human to human, and suddenly,
boom, we're pulled down to the tiny
perspective of an ant. How does this look
to an ant? Hey. Don't forget us. We're
here too. We are in God's world
just like you are.
So shifting perspective
is is the medium
of the Quran. It's one of the messages
of the Quran.
It's something
that is confusing
only if you feel that you need to
do everything yourself.
You know,
it would be confusing as an individual,
but this is one of the reasons why
we live in community.
We have in our community, we have scholars.
We have those who are going to sit
for many hours reading books,
but we also have poets.
We also have activists.
We have young people
with their energy and their vigor. We have
older people.
We have those who
don't get along that well with people, but
they great get along great with animals, and
they can tell you a lot about the
natural world from their experience.
So part of the perspective
then
that we need to examine things
by is from this perspective of a true
meaning not just some kind of
democratic political
mechanism for making decisions
at this high level,
but just for our lives, our general decision
making.
Who who needs to give input? And of
course, we can have experts,
and a scholar who is interactive with people
will bring in that experience. But
people
Now we have a bit of a challenge
with animals because, of course, the prophet Solomon
understood the language of the animals, could understand
the animals according to the Quran.
So how will we listen to them,
and how will we
understand what they're saying to us?
Through science,
through study, but also through imagination,
Imaginative
scenarios. What would the world look like to
them? All of these things are useful and
we need the impact
or input of everyone for that.
The
but
one of the things that helps us
with the goals of the sharia
is that these are
goals or aspects of human life that
are
quite universally
understandable. And this is why we're able to
make a comparison
between them and the 10 commandments.
Because even as our our scholars said
that someone
who
a society does not necessarily need revelation
to identify these as goals.
Imam Al Ghazali said these things are known
intuitively,
and intuition is really just a kind of
experience.
That it's known intuitively that any society needs
to protect these goals, to preserve these goals
if they're going to survive.
And this is why when we talk about
the goals of the Sharia, there is an
understanding.
But again, what does it mean
to understand,
to preserve family if we don't have experience
with families.
You know?
Okay. I'm talking about family and you're talking
about family.
But if we don't
know the stories of families,
if we don't know the family that,
you know, is down the street and they're
having to make a decision between dental care
for their children and elderly care for their
parents,
How are we going to make policy decisions
about the distribution of property? Because the distribution
of property,
taxation,
how we
will determine
how the wealth is spread and how we
understand what we have in common and apart
is intimately
will affect intimately the kind of families that
we want.
We need to understand that there's going to
be conflicts,
and sometimes there's not a good answer except
to take a completely different perspective.
You own a store,
a little shop somewhere, and a teenager comes
in and steals something, shoplifts something from your
store.
At this point, do we bring down the
law and say, this is about protection of
property you stole?
You're going to be punished.
Or is this the time when we bring
in the perspective of mercy and say,
what made you do that? Who are you?
We may find out that this teenager is
homeless,
has run away from an abusive home.
And so again,
we need to bring in
all of these different perspectives and frames in
order to
get a grasp. And this is something
that a well trained scholar in a society
that is functioning
where they can interact with people and have
input and care about that
will be able to bring in. And that
without it,
we will be
impoverished
because we will not be able to understand
things from all of these different
perspectives.
So finally,
what are some of the the the ways
that we can balance or integrate,
these goals.
It is impossible to do this simply as
an academic exercise.
There need to be institutions
through which we
further these goals as well as talk about
these goals.
So for example,
a
a family can only be preserved
and protected and encouraged
through
formation,
which means good examples,
through education,
by good nutrition.
And what does that mean? Does that mean
that the family is responsible
for all of these aspects themselves? We know
that that's not the case.
And it's why I think this community is
a very generous and compassionate community
and tends to support public policies
that really do protect and encourage family.
But it's very easy to get distracted
by words
without digging into the meaning
of what it is.
Yes, we believe in family. We believe in
honoring parents. We believe in
the preservation and protection of property.
But what how can we organize ourselves in
order to do it? And before me, you
had a number of
public servants, politicians who came and and thanked
you on about,
for what you're doing.
These
you know, it's not just voting for them,
but it's really understanding
the impact
of the policies
that they are
advocating for
and putting in place when they're in office,
how they affect
all of the community.
And my final
the final point that I wanna say is
that for the Muslim community, you know, very
often
you hear many of us say we need
to break out, you know, of our parochial
kind of perspective, looking at things from our
perspective.
I think we want to be inclusive, but
sometimes, again,
if we don't have the framework
for doing that,
we can overlook people or we can overlook
things. And so I wanna suggest at the
end of it that another layer that we
put on in our decision making process or
in our analysis,
in addition to something
in addition to the goals of the Sharia
would be to an analysis that I would
call circles of community.
And what I mean by that is that
each one of us
is in
multiple circles of community.
On each of these
according to each of these
goals of the sacred law. For example, family.
We have our
nuclear family.
We have our extended family.
We have beyond that other relatives.
And then we can go to sort of
the
the looser
ethnic
group which is family like
or from the same heritage.
Now as we
to be committed
and responsible to our nuclear family
does not mean that we don't care about
other families
or that we don't care about the extended
family. It means that there's an intensity of
commitment
at that smaller circle of belonging
than there is beyond that. And as we
go beyond
the smaller circle,
then our responsibilities
and commitments become more collective.
So there's
one circle.
Then we have the circle of our religious
community.
And this is something that's very clear in
the Quran. The Quran does not describe 2
religious communities,
believer and unbeliever.
The Quran
shows very clearly that the Muslim community
this is our, you know, our Muslim ummah.
Our Muslim brothers and sisters are our nuclear
family. They're our tight circle.
Beyond that
is the broader circle
of believers,
of people who believe in god
and the last day. Again and again,
Allah
in the holy Quran
talks about those who believe in god in
the last day, primarily Ahlul Kitab, the scripturalists,
but more inclusive than that.
But does our circle
end with that?
It does not end with that because
the very
dignity
that is imprinted on us
by being created
by the divine, which is karama, nobility and
Nobility and dignity is something
that is for all human beings. Who are
human beings? This
is the Quranic
description of humanity. What does it mean? Children
of Adam.
You can't get rid of your family. You
may not like them,
you may sometimes be annoyed with them, but
whatever, they're still our family.
So this is another circle.
So let me
suggest then that we can continue to do
this with all of the the human interests
and draw circles where
being part
of a very
intense
relationship
with other people religiously or familiar or or
or politically, nationally,
ethnically never means that you need to exclude
others.
It just means that your world can continue
to expand, and we should never forget
that we belong to these broader circles,
and that we can continue to to expand
them a little more and a little more
to bring more people in
as we do not neglect
our very close
and tight and intimate obligations.
Thank you for your attention.