Khalid Latif – Muntada Tolerance and Compassion in Islam
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AI: Transcript ©
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Please join me in welcoming Imam Khaled Latif.
That he had a wife that was the
object of his adoration and the 2 had
a young son that they had a deep
care for.
And the situation comes about that this young
man, his mother passes away and his elderly
father now needs a place to stay.
And so he goes to live in the
home of this young man.
And this elderly man, he is so frail,
he is so fragile,
he is in need of a constant care
and attention.
And the young man's wife is given the
responsibility
of providing this.
She becomes agitated and frustrated and says to
her husband, the young man, that I am
constantly looking after the needs of your father.
Won't you do something about this?
And the young man, he says, nothing.
And then one evening, they sit down to
eat their dinner. And as they're eating this
dinner, this old man is so fragile. He
is so frail. The sheer weight of the
plate that he is holding in his hands
is too much for him to handle.
And so it falls from his grasp onto
the ground, shattering into pieces.
And the young man's wife, she takes the
opportunity
to say to her husband that, look at
what your father has done now.
Look at this mess that he has made.
Won't you do something about this?
And the young man, he says to his
elderly father that From now on, you will
not eat at the same table as my
wife, my son, and I.
But since you cannot eat without making a
mess,
henceforth you will sit at this table in
the corner.
And since you cannot eat from the same
plates that we eat off of,
from now on, you will eat from this
wooden bowl.
And the elderly man with a tear in
his eyes, he goes and does what he
is told.
The next day now, this young man, he
comes upon his own son. He comes upon
his own child and he sees him on
the ground playing with some scraps of wood.
And he wants to be with his son.
He wants to play with him. He wants
to participate
in that which his child is doing.
And so when he gets close enough to
him, he says with love and adoration in
his voice, yeah,
oh my son, what is it that you
are doing?
And the young boy reciprocating
the same love and adoration for his father
says,
oh, my father,
I am making a wooden bowl for you
to eat out of when you get older.
We learn in this manner,
Explicitly,
implicitly,
consciously,
subconsciously,
you and I, the individuals that we are
today, is most definitely
impacted by every yesterday that we were in
this world.
Every interaction that we were fortunate or unfortunate
enough to have experienced in the course of
our lives shapes the individuals that we are
today.
And as much as every yesterday has an
impact on the I that is me that
stands in front of you,
the person that I am today will most
definitely impact the person that I am tomorrow.
And when we are trying to understand these
concepts, these values of compassion and toleration,
it's important for us to start our discussion
here.
Because the way compassion and toleration
manifests itself in my life beyond an abstract
or theoretical
discussion
is gonna be based off of how I
engage those values growing up.
What will my understanding of compassion be? What
will my understanding
of mercy be? What will my understanding of
toleration be
if I lived and grew up in a
world that was devoid of these values?
If I was never engaged with a semblance
of mercy, if I was surrounded by all
kinds of anger, if vice was something that
I regularly interacted with.
Today, when I try to understand and find
it,
where would I even begin to look?
Who I am today,
I have certain characteristics
that are beyond debate or argumentation.
The person that stands in front of you,
I could say easily without any dispute,
that I am a man
and you can't tell me otherwise.
I am 29 years old,
and that's something that is a fact.
I can speak about my being married. I
can speak about living in New York City.
I can speak about so many aspects to
my identity.
But then there are facets of who I
am
that I don't get to assign to myself,
but you all, having interacted with me, get
to say whether I am actually those things.
I don't get to make the determination as
to whether I am compassionate.
I don't get to make the determination as
to whether
I am tolerant,
whether I am honest, whether I'm trustworthy, whether
I espouse a sense of integrity,
these are not values that I can self
assign to myself.
But the way that I will interact with
you, the way that I engage with you,
the way that I am to you,
will enable me to be someone who could
actually possess those characteristics
if you decide
to say that there are things that I
embody.
I can't walk into this room and say,
Look at how great I am.
And everybody simply acquiesces and says, yes, because
you have said it, then that is it.
But the values that can be part of
my identity
have to be rooted in an action
that then demonstrate to you that I am
those things and you then assign them to
me.
In our understanding of Islam as a compassionate
religion, as a
religion, we can go through the pages of
the Quran and we can find verse after
verse after verse that speaks about mercy, that
speaks about compassion, that speaks about being understanding.
Without condition, without qualification.
But the way that message propagated itself to
that initial generation
did not come merely from abstract concepts that
existed within the pages of a text.
But the individual that was chosen to propagate
that message was one that espoused a sense
of integrity that the people around him knew
him to only be somebody who was good.
That he was somebody who spoke that message
but then he lived it in a way
where in their actions, they knew that Muhammad,
this messenger of God, was somebody who was
honest, who was merciful, who was compassionate.
The prophet Muhammad does not stand and say
to the people, I am good.
He does not stand in front of the
people and say, I am compassionate.
He does not stand in front of the
people and say, I am merciful.
But the people, they know him to be
this.
In our understanding,
what our tradition tells us is that Muhammad,
he is known as Al Amin,
the trustworthy one, the honest one.
But he is known as this before he
is known as nabi,
a prophet, a messenger.
It is not a quantified amount of knowledge
that elevates him to a level of goodness.
But this is a man who, when he
is trusted, he honors his trust.
This is a man when he makes promises,
he keeps his promises.
This is a man who, the staunchest of
his enemies, could never have a problem with
anything other than his message, let alone saying
even the slightest things against his character because
they knew that he was a good honorable
person.
He greeted young and old, male and female.
He was someone who would spend time with
children. He gave of everything that he had
for the sake of those who were around
him, not looking at what he would lose,
but always looking in the process at what
someone else would gain.
And in his action,
we found
mercy and compassion.
Not just in his discourse, not just in
his rhetoric.
He did not say, go and be, and
not follow suit on those words.
But they knew that Islam was tolerant and
compassionate
because the man who was teaching Islam
was tolerant and compassionate.
How does he get to this place?
How is he living in such a way
where he is able to tap into the
diversity of his society,
engaging social classes that no one would even
speak to,
encouraging people to honour the rights of women
in a society that sought to push people
down because of their gender.
In his own process of socialization,
the prophet, peace be upon him, was a
man who he grew up in certain ways
that had an impact on him being who
he was when he received prophethood.
As a child, Muhammad is born without a
father.
His father passes away prior to his birth.
And in the absence of a father, this
man is raised by 4 different women.
His own mother, Amina, is there.
And she says that when Mohammed is born,
the pregnancy is such a light experience
That an action that is so painful, it
can only be called labor by any other
woman going through it.
This woman says, I felt no pain whatsoever.
Because the coming of Muhammad was not meant
to cause hardship to anybody.
This was one woman who was there in
his childhood.
A second woman by the name of Thawayba,
who was the emancipated servant of the prophet's
uncle, who, when the news of the birth
of his nephew reached him, he was so
ecstatic. He sets this woman free and says,
Go and nurse my nephew.
A third woman by the name of Halima
Sadia,
who was from the tribe of the Banusad,
that it was custom at that time in
the Meccan society, when a child was born,
that they would send the child to go
and live with the tribes at the outskirts
of the city.
So Mohammed was entrusted
under the care of this woman.
And she was the 3rd woman who played
a role in his upbringing.
A 4th woman and arguably, in my opinion,
one of the most interesting people in the
life of Mohammed, a woman by the name
of Ayman Barakah,
who is at 16 years of age taken
as a servant in the household of Abdullah,
the prophet's father.
She is arguably the only companion of Muhammad
who is with him from the day he
is born until the day he passes away.
She is the 4th woman who is there
when he is
being socialized as a child.
That as a child, when he is learning
values of trust and values of care and
nurture.
Whenever he opens his infant eyes and he
is crying the way our children would cry,
he's met with the tender, gentle,
merciful care of a woman.
How then would he be somebody who does
not honor the rights of women when he
is older?
How then would he be somebody who is
not compassionate
towards women when he is in that place
of responsibility?
As a child, this young man, he goes
from place to place, visiting person after person.
He is born into the city of Mecca.
He goes to the people of the Banu
Sa'ad. At about 5 years of age, he
starts to ask his mother, Where is my
father? The way most children would ask their
mothers if their fathers are not there.
And so she takes him to Medina where
his father is buried.
But for the purposes of our conversation,
he is going to different peoples.
He is being exposed to different customs and
different norms.
He is not isolated into an insular, ethnocentric
mode of learning.
But he is engaging diversity.
And he is seeing people live in different
ways.
In his own home, he has this woman,
Ayman Baraka, that we've spoken about, who she
is not Arab.
She is not Qurayshi.
She's an Abyssinian woman. She's Ethiopian. Her skin
is black.
And so when the prophet, as a child,
is learning
about interacting with people,
when it is being normalized for him,
His eyes are gazing in his own home
upon someone who is close to his heart
that does not look like him at all.
And when he gets older,
he is able to engage people that come
from all walks of life.
His sense of compassion,
his sense of mercy is not limited
just to people who are like him.
But he has become in tune with the
realities of those who are different from him
simply by the fact that he engages people
who are different than he.
When we think of our gatherings and we
contrast them to the paradigm of gatherings that
are divine in nature,
our gatherings are such that they are based
off of principles
of exclusivity.
We are defined by a certain understanding that
it's not about who we are keeping our
company in, who we are letting in,
but, more importantly, who we are keeping out.
I work at New York University
and I used to work at Princeton University.
The way Princeton
maintains its name, and I'll talk about Princeton
and not NYU, so I don't get fired
from my job,
At Princeton University,
they let in a certain caliber of student,
that you have a certain SAT score, a
certain GPA, a certain extracurricular
activity.
And if Princeton started to let everybody in,
it wouldn't be Princeton anymore.
Its name, its reputation
it would change
if all of a sudden its doors were
open to everyone.
But when you contrast this to gatherings that
are divine in their nature, when we look
at those gatherings that truly embody this understanding,
you can have the best of creation in
those gatherings
and the most wretched of creation in those
gatherings
and they don't take away from the majesty
of the divine.
Nobody says, why did you let this individual
into this temple or synagogue?
How dare this person
enter into this church or this mosque?
We don't think about it in that way
because those gatherings are not meant to be
in that way.
But much of the time, our sense of
compassion is limited
because we don't even know about the people
who we're supposed to be compassionate towards.
We don't even know their existence. We don't
even know their reality.
And if we don't even know that they're
there,
how will we
even begin to show them any kind of
mercy?
One of the first traditions that we are
taught
when we are studying Islam
is known as the hadith al Rahmah, the
tradition of mercy.
And in this narration, the prophet Muhammad, peace
be upon him, he
says,
That the merciful one is merciful to those
who are merciful. Be merciful on the earth.
The one who is in the heavens will
be merciful to you.
But the idea that this narration is evoking
is don't just talk about mercy, but be
merciful.
Let that idea of compassion
resonate in your action.
Let it be something that flows from within
your being and emanates into this society that's
trying to understand
not only if a god exists, but if
that god is
representation
will set the standard as to whether someone
will understand that or not.
Why would anybody
think that
we are people who are compassionate
or merciful
after interacting with us?
How would any individual understand Islam to be
a religion
of the values that we are discussing tonight
after interacting with Muslims?
We are not in a place where doctrines
of theology or understanding
ritualistic
practice or law is going to sway a
person's understanding
whether or not a religion is actually something
good.
But what people will look to are the
practitioners of those faiths.
They want to understand
how my being a Muslim is not something
that brings benefit to me,
but how my being a Muslim brings benefit
to the society that I'm a part of.
How am I living my faith in such
a way where there won't be any other
understanding
other than it is something that is one
of compassion,
mercy and tolerance?
It's not about what Islam says.
Because people can take text and scripture and
turn it into whatever they want it to
say.
I can take my argument that I want
to prove, flip through the pages, and say,
this proves as to why I have the
right to treat you in the most atrocious
of
ways. And I could also look at it
and say, this is why
you have a right over me, and I
will do whatever I can in my power
to honor that right.
It will come from my deed and my
action,
not just simply discussion.
And when we think about Muhammad,
this was a man who he did much
for those who were around him.
And based off of the way he carried
himself,
the people had an understanding
that he was someone who was honest, compassionate
and merciful.
He would tell his companions that God is
kind and he loves kindness.
God is compassionate and he loves compassion.
God is beautiful and he loves beauty.
And in our conversations today,
we don't really see these things being discussed.
We've turned Islam into a religion of do's
and don'ts.
We've turned it into something that's restrictive as
opposed to expansive,
Something that is not rearing the benefit that
the implementation of it is meant to interject
into a society.
And if I'm not someone who is doing
wrong by you,
but I'm still not somebody who is doing
right by you,
This is still something that's problematic.
I can't get away with saying that
just because I haven't hurt you, that's enough.
If there's still something that I can do
that would be able to benefit you,
what would really
inhibit me from implementing that action?
We get lost a lot in ideas of
grandeur and think about things in terms of
impact in the masses.
But our understanding of even the smallest of
actions that are rooted in well intentions and
a sound sense of compassion
can be the catalyst for change.
And so a story that I will end
with, that I was taught when I was
younger, involves a young man who was a
known author in his community.
And this young man, when he wanted inspiration
for his writings, he would go out and
be in nature.
And so, one day, he is walking along
the shoreline of a sea and as he
is walking down the shoreline, he sees a
figure in the distance
and it intrigues him. It looks as if
it's doing some kind of dance.
And when he gets closer, he sees that
the figure is not dancing but it seems
to be picking something up off of the
ground and throwing it into the ocean.
And when he gets even closer, he sees
that upon the shore, there are thousands and
thousands of starfish
and there is a young boy who is
picking them up and throwing them into the
sea.
When he gets close enough to engage this
young man, he asks him, what is it
that you are doing?'
And the young boy, he says, I'm throwing
the fish back into the water.'
And the author, he says to him,
why are you doing this?'
And he says, they have washed up onto
the shore with the tide and if I
don't do so, they will lose all of
their water and they will surely die.'
And the young author, he looks up and
down the coast and all he sees is
fish upon fish.
And he looks to the boy and he
says, 'There are so many.
There is no way you will be able
to get all of them back into this
water.
What is the point of what you are
doing? What difference will it make?
And the young boy, he looks at the
man, he looks down at the ground,
he picks up one of the fish,
throws it into the sea,
and says it made a difference to that
one.
If you can affect even one heart with
an act of compassion,
don't keep yourself from doing it.
If you have the ability to engage in
even one act of goodness,
something that will benefit somebody else,
don't look at what you will lose, but
see what the other will gain.
Because that one act could be the catalyst
of a much needed sense of compassion and
mercy than much of this world is devoid
of right now.
But if you hold onto it for yourself,
then the rest of us will be prevented
from benefiting from that blessing that can only
uniquely come from you.
Thank you.