Why Did You Allow All This?

On the Death of Moral Urgency and the Inherently Revolutionary Nature of Faith

Still from ‘The Hidden Half’ (2001, dir. Tahmineh Milani)

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”

―Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

Every prophet was a revolutionary. Every sage, every mystic, every knower of truth, stood in defiance of the empires, economies, and norms that thrived on injustice. That is what made them who they were.

Our modern world is, in large part, one run by those who claim to be followers of these prophets. A quarter of the world's population is Muslim alone; add Christians into the mix, and you have 4 billion people – half of the people on Earth!

Despite differences in creed, across Abrahamic traditions, believers unite in worship of a greater power, testifying to the truths espoused by Moses, Jesus, and Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon them all). So why is it that more than fifty percent of the world is made up of those who supposedly revere these great figures, and yet those acting on their instruction seem to be so few? The tragedy is that for far too many, testimony ends at the tongue. It is our crime and consequence that it is rarely lived. Were people of faith to truly adhere to the legacies left by these great sages and embody the purpose, message, and morality they advocated, our world would look radically different from how it does today. Because faith is revolutionary. Are we?

If we are, pray tell, why then do we venerate the heroes we do? We anoint with awe moral actors like whistleblowers and revolutionaries precisely because they’re the few among us willing to stand up against what we all rebuke but continue to tolerate. The social function of hero-worship is essentially thus a displacement of action, the selfishness we embody excused by the solace we derive from praising those who are brave enough to do what we cannot fail to. If we emulated our role models as they have managed to, our world would be filled with justice and peace, not silence in the face of unending sorrow.

Of course, no faith or tradition has a monopoly on justice. It is incumbent on every human being to do their part and fight for what's right, so we may live in a just and kind world; we see beautiful souls of all beliefs and none making their efforts. But if you happen to be a person belonging to one of these traditions, you must know there is an obligation upon you to be an active participant in creating such a world; know that true faith is never personal, never selfish, never a mere path to paradise. It is public, relational, and demanding — or it is nothing at all. If you think the path to salvation is via the lifting of your hands for prayer but not for anything else, instead of defending your doctrine, you defy it.

The inaction responsible for our current ongoing tragedies is a sin held by many because its advocate has spared none. Its advocate, of course, is the corpse of urgency. The necessary prerequisite for action has been killed, buried alive, grave desecrated before our eyes. So let us examine its autopsy, identify the conditions that have led to our apathy in this moment. Immediately, we can recognize moral fatigue as a consequence of living in an age of so many crises (for those who pay attention to them in the first place), the anesthetizing effect of social media’s overexposure, and perhaps most potently, the dreadful rise of individualism over collective responsibility.

Contemporary morality often recognizes the beauty of empathy but stops at feeling. Our faiths, however, teach us that empathy is meaningless without moving towards moral action. Even secular moral philosophies offer helpful avenues of understanding here. Utilitarianism, for instance, demands that we serve the greatest good. Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ in particular is a concept I’ve never been able to forget since I first learned of it in high school. The compassionate blindness to difference it inherently promotes is no different than the mercy espoused by our traditions. Yet we fail to apply that mercy to our mentality and movement.

Are the believers of the world then just operating as the silent majority, making us the greatest obstacle to justice? We acknowledge the ethical weight of inaction, yet carry on as we are. Where’s the creativity that should have been born from our mourning? We know quietism is most certainly not the position of those on the side of the oppressed, yet our mouths seem to have been mysteriously taped shut. This complicity, we have to know, leaves one spiritually defunct, no matter how much one prays and thinks themselves virtuous. Justice is a human imperative, not a religious one, but I only speak of faith so extensively because it astounds me how contradictory the believers of the world are behaving. As a Muslim, I have grown weary of participating in conversations I find to be necessary only to be met with a nod, a sigh, a quick prayer, and a change of subject. I can not reconcile the hypocrisy, can not understand how we have diluted and dishonored the beauty of our greatest gift so.

I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. The stories of the prophets emphasize how ostracized and isolated they were, and even when they amassed followers, those very believers many a time betrayed the ideals they once claimed they would die for. I suppose the naïveté with which I was operating was based on the hope that with technology allowing us to be witness to so many scenes we otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to, we would naturally feel compelled to resolve those tragedies, however we must…because why wouldn’t we? Unlike previous times, now we had to do something because there’s evidence before us, there’s undeniable witnessing taking place. I have come to know now, however, that it is considered absurd to many to think this way. I weep and ask why that’s so, pleading for an answer as to why and how action has come to be considered radical. Action — the foundation of humanity! The norm, it seems now, is to bear witness and leave it at that. Weep, this time tells us, but then wipe your tears, you’ve done your part.

I, too, am guilty of this. What is this piece if not an example of my very critique? I am not ignorant of the potential perception of my tone as pretentious, self-righteous, or simply absurd. God forgive me if I seem so, I mean not to condemn others and paint myself as saintly, God forbid. I write this with the frustrated recognition and shame that I, too, am a part of the system I lament and condemn, knowing that this is a hollow complaint. This is perhaps my attempt to come out of my own limitations by publicly sharing this. If not that, at least a weak repentance for my contribution to this collective sin.

Maybe the truth is that we’ve never had moral urgency, not as a collective anyway. If we did the 2 years of genocide we have all been witness to, live-streamed before us, it would not be taking place. We would not have seen one million Iraqis killed in an illegal invasion started over a lie. We wouldn’t have left refugees to die in the ocean, falling off of tiny dinghies, and worse, coldly refer to it as a mere ‘migrant crisis’. We would live in a perfect world.

However, this affliction isn’t limited to examples as visible as war; injustice has seeped into every aspect of our lives, wherever we find ourselves on this tiny planet. Politically, economically, socially, and culturally, evil has taken its course. There is something sinister about the sneakier ways it presents itself, the ways people still manage to justify and brush under the rug more easily, because its consequences are just as severe.

Sadly, we live in a time where loud voices declare that overlooking such travesties and giving into selfishness is a completely acceptable choice. They find every excuse they can to defend their overconsumption, their environmental crimes, their silent compliance, and then use the latest lexicon to shame you for condemning them. Harm thus becomes irrelevant to such people so long as they get to indulge their base desires. This is a poisonous ideology that has come to define much of modernity’s current crisis; it is why we don't have nearly enough moral outrage for the morally outrageous, but more than enough for the meaningless and minuscule. If there are to be any voices of reason amidst their redundancy, you would think it would be people of faith, but our silence has sealed itself as our stance.

Faith as Revolution

"Whoever among you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith." — Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

One need not have a seminary education to grasp the basic fact that our great saints were, more than anything else, advocates for justice — who knew the work it required was inseparable from the belief that called for it. They devoted their lives to the effort of this virtue prevailing. For believers, this truth should be obvious, and beyond that, acted upon.

For the Love of Moses

It is a tragedy beyond explanation that the obliteration of the Palestinian people is occurring before our eyes, as it has been for the last 75 years. It is a deep shame, a heartbreaking one, that it is conducted in the name of Judaism, claiming the same God who sent the Ten Commandments is the one ordering such cruelty. But when Jewish students sat in the encampments of university yards wearing their yarmulkes and hosting their Sabbath, adorning keffiyehs and calling for divestment from Israeli apartheid, they honored the revolutionary spirit of Moses in their choice.

For the Love of Jesus

It is another woe that the world’s largest religion (officially) is one that reveres a poor outcast refugee — who stood against an empire to proclaim the necessity of justice and equity — yet now fails to institutionally apply his principles. From every angle one could view him, be it agnostic, Catholic, or Muslim, nobody can deny the revolutionary essence of Jesus’ very being. Pope Francis was a good example of what it means to honor and live that memory.

A verse I love from the Old Testament perfectly captures what I mean to convey;

“This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’ If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims, quit gossiping about other people’s sins, If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight. I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places— firm muscles, strong bones. You will be like a well-watered garden, a spring whose waters never fail. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again.” [Isaiah, 58:6-12]

For the Love of Muhammad ﷺ

The sadness that compelled me to write this can perhaps never be sufficiently expressed, because it’s rooted in my ultimate melancholy: the state of the Muslim world. I will afford us compassion and grace for bearing the brunt of imperialist aggression designed to divide and destroy, but when you see that there are people who still rise above this, the others lose their excuses. In this treachery, tyranny, and tragedy, we have abandoned any trace of taqwa we could claim to have.

When you testify your submission to one God, you are declaring you shall worship no other. To worship another doesn’t mean you get on your knees and fold your hands or prostrate. It means you obey them, you fear them, and you tolerate them, even when you know of their evil. Recognize the silent, subtle altars you’ve built for modern idols. When you fail to condemn the darkness of something, despite knowing it, how loyal are you to the light? That silence becomes your shirk [idol worship]. When you say you love Moses but don’t stand up to today’s Pharaoh, be it a man or a system or an ideology, ask yourself if you really love him. Would you follow him to the shore today? The same goes for Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

This reminds me of two hadiths:

“There will come a time when holding on to your faith will be like holding a hot coal.”

That time is now. Not only because the secular modern age rewards hedonism and ridicules righteousness, but also because if it were easy, we would be practicing what we preach. But the reason we do not do what we could be is that it requires a terrifying amount of courage, a selflessness, a genuine belief in something greater, something worthy of our sacrifice. It’s holding hot coal.

“Islam began as something strange and will return to being strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.”

This, I believe, can be applied to all three major Abrahamic traditions in their truest form. It genuinely is strange now to act fully on their principles. Surely, thus, if Jesus were to return today and demand we afford the displaced, hungry, and oppressed the refuge they need and deserve, he would be labeled a terrorist and condemned by the very people and systems who dare act in his name. Without a doubt, if the blessed Prophet Muhammad ﷺ were to see the ‘leaders’ ruling much of the Muslim world today, he would weep at their cruelty. How many take the name of religion as a cloak to wear, but afford faith no seat in their hearts.

Faith always has been and always will be an emancipatory force, because God is liberation and liberator, and so His servants should strive to be. To know and love Him is to follow His command, which is so simple, despite those who attempt to turn it into something complex and complicated. Stand for what is just and kind, He says. Be merciful and modest. Let not oppression prevail. Stray not from the sacred.

There are many intricacies of course in our modern world; I am not negating the validity of or need for a refined legal system — there is a reason jurisprudence is such a core element of how we practice and fulfill our obligations, and why scholars and jurists have so extensively studied and written on how to live ethically and effectively. But some things really are simple: children working in a sweatshop for $1 a day so thousands of ugly crop tops can be dumped on a beach somewhere? Wrong. Yet this is a core aspect of our modern capitalist reality, one we are all well aware of, one that desecrates not just the rights of humans but the Earth. So, where are the people of faith fighting against this on the scale that is required? Let us not pretend that there is an absence of movements actively working to fight these evils, those that adhere more closely to the values our faiths teach us, yet we fail to support. Our sermons rarely, if ever, mention them — sometimes, they admonish them instead; a pity of great proportions.

For all who claim the love of these prophets and principles: here is your pharaoh, here is your Roman empire, here is your idol-surrounded Kaaba. Strike then, why won’t you!

The Few Who Remember

It’s easier to envision how we can be such believers by looking at some great examples before us. One of the most iconic representations of such a faithful individual is Malcolm X, a believer who never shied away from confronting the empire with boundless courage and faith. He called out injustice when and where he saw it, not just because he was a black man in segregated America, but because he was a Muslim who knew that the faith he followed required him to. His prophet(s) set that example.

More recently, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was just released from a French prison after 40 years. When he returned to Lebanon, he made a stunning remark on the state of our global apathy and inaction in the face of genocide. While we all understandably condemn world leaders, Georges, a Maronite Christian, rightfully hit back:

“Palestinian children are dying of hunger just meters away from 80 million Muslims in Egypt. This is a historical disgrace to the Arab masses, more than to the regimes."

He reminds us that the leaders deserve shame, yes, but there comes a time when your insults hurled at them become embarrassing. We, too, are sinners for committing the very crime we critique them for, keeping our condemnation limited to our tongues, sitting in our shallow puddles of tears, and thinking that shall suffice.

This inaction extends to all forms of injustice, the many isms we all frown over today. The environmental crisis, wealth disparity, femicide, etc, are all blatantly present for all to see. Yet it occurs to only a minority of people that to truly obey a Merciful and Just God is to be merciful and just yourself. They take this as offering their charity and leave it at that; they do not acknowledge their faith’s call to prioritize compassion and abolish the systems that allow such injustice to exist in the first place. Of course, such extreme change will not happen overnight or with ease, indisputably. But the hypocrisy, irony, and ignorance are what I refer to. If it’s not even acknowledged, how can it be challenged?

I am reminded of the words of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who, notably, was also a reverend:

“True compassion is more than throwing a coin to a beggar. It demands of our humanity that if we live in a society that produces beggars, we are morally commanded to restructure that society.”

This reference to ‘a moral commandment to restructure society’ brings to mind a beautiful example of people who exemplified what it means to honor the Prophet ﷺ and his principles in action. When the brave people of Algeria stamped out French colonizers and liberated themselves from over a century of oppression, they took to the streets to celebrate their victory. When they did, crowds joyfully proclaimed, ‘Oh Prophet Muhammad, congratulations, Algeria has been returned to you.’

They recognized not just their liberation but the truth that the Prophet ﷺ was a steadfast symbol of justice, synonymous with it. In congratulating him, they acknowledged that his stand for equity and goodness had prevailed and would continue to do so. Islam, after all, came as a movement prescribing us a way to live, not just personally as individuals, but socially as a collective. It reminds us that in God’s infinite wisdom, everything is interconnected; this world a cosmic web we are all a part of and shall always remain. We must then ask ourselves as believers if we are claiming selfless revolutionaries as our own while actively choosing lives of selfishness. Have we turned our faith into mere garments of pride and prejudice? So it keeps us divided into groups, betraying the very ideal all our faiths rest upon, that humanity is one, and compassion must extend to all? We look at each other as different and thus unworthy; it is the only explanation for our cowardice.

In Surah 5, verse 8 of the Quran, God instructs humanity:

“Do not let your hatred of a people lead you to injustice.”

Not ‘your difference from people’ — your hatred! This implies that there will indeed be people you hate, a real differentiation from merely being different from them. Still, even in such circumstances, God commands that you must never betray justice!

The great saint Imam Ali ع, an exemplar of Quranic embodiment, revered for his sense of justice and equity, remarked on his deathbed:

“Fear God as regards the rights of the minorities. Fear God as regards the poor and destitute amongst you.”

Tragically, the modern idol worship of capitalism, secularism, imperialism, and individualism means we have abandoned the poor, the destitute, the different. In the beginning, as the sole defiant of God’s command, Iblis established himself as the black sheep. What a shame that we have allowed the roles to reverse, letting such a sin fester and thereby creating a world where Iblis is preferred over Adam, where being morally upright and acting on it makes one the black sheep.

Perhaps this sounds overly and unfairly dramatic. However, a quick glimpse at the news makes it apparent that the majority today are those who prefer silence over salvation. In a world where children beg before our eyes, this silence is an unacceptable sin. Come the Hour, an unforgivable one.

Many will call me an idealist for espousing the things I have here. That is precisely the source of my grief. Perhaps we do not believe in the same thing, and that is okay. Let us not pretend, though, that God’s command is confined to our feelings, accepting the stagnancy of our feet. Realistically, we will never collectively magically transform into the adherents we should ideally be. That doesn’t mean we don’t talk about how we could at least try. There are plenty of beautiful examples of faithful revolutionaries today, those we can and ought to look to for inspiration. People who are uncompromising and unafraid, who know the truth is never easy to adhere to, but what’s easy is not what’s worthwhile. There are countless more I need not name; they shine their unique light. May we recognize them and follow their example. May we reflect and rise to honor the revolutionaries we revere, never daring to dim their lighted legacies by claiming their love but ignoring their law.

So join a union, go to a protest, ask yourself if and why you fear creation more than the Creator. Educate yourself, genuinely engage with people from different communities, confront your inner pharaoh that prevents you from calling out the external ones.Remember that sins sown through silence will carry a mighty weight on the scale, one that very well may prohibit your salvation.

“And establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance.” [Quran, 55:9]

Supplementary Posts:

If Kierkegaard Knew Karbala

Red, Resistance, and The Smell of Roses