Muslimah in Progress

It’s been quite a weekend in our house.  I’m recovering from a nasty sinus infection, trying to remember to take my antibiotics at the right time and still getting another head cold on top of that.  I hate dosing myself with medicine because then all I want to do is sleep.  Sleep or sniffle, sniffle or sleep.  Finally, alhamdulillah, I’m getting over the worst of it.  I can feel the phlegm in my chest wanting to come out and all I can envision is that gross little cartoon character on the Mucinex commercial.

So, I’ve been kind of out of it, but I’m on the upside now.  Then, Saturday evening, my husband took ill.  For my dear husband, being sick is a family affair.  He likes to share symptoms with everyone in the house, and will call his sister to give her a blow-by-blow account of his malaise.  This time around was something like food poisoning.  Was it something I cooked or something from outside the house?  I don’t know.  Alhamdulillah, no one else in the house got sick, but my hubby was sick enough for everyone.  Poor thing.  He was really miserable.  When he’s healthy, he’s constantly on the move.  It’s impossible for him to sit still unless he’s engrossed in a lecture or a rerun of NCIS (the letters of which he invariably gets out of order when asking me to change channels).  This illness laid him low and kept him in the bed.  He felt that there were knives poking him in the stomach and he couldn’t keep down any food.  I medicated him as best I could, tried to keep him hydrated, and spent most of the weekend corralling the kids and trying to keep them from being too loud.  The worst of it passed in about twenty-four hours.  When he started feeling a bit better I went in to keep him company and bring him water.  He was trying to figure out exactly what it was that brought on this illness, and I was surprised when he told me it was backbiting.

Now, you have to understand my husband.  He is mashaAllah a religious and very private person.  Never in a million years would he give up a confidence.  Brother A can tell him a secret and no one else will ever know about it.  He is trusted in our community and people look to him as a role model.  But he does have this weakness.  He listens.  He will listen to someone’s problem.  He will listen to a funny story.  His ability to listen makes him a good counselor as he tries to help people.  But the bad side is that he often listens to things that are, shall we say, not useful.  Gossip.  Oh, most of us do it, to some extent.  He happens to be the kind of person that others feel comfortable sharing stories with, and he is not aggressive enough in cutting off the story teller.  This is what happened on Friday.  One friend was gossiping about a mutual friend.  Of course, this kind of gossip is never along the lines of “Oh, I saw him serving the homeless at the soup kitchen”, but rather was negative.  And of course the proper Islamic thing to do is say “Brother, don’t backbite about our friend.  Surely if he has committed a sin it is not our job to uncover him, and Allah knows we commit sins as well,” but instead he made all the proper tsk tsk noises and listened in disbelief.  He didn’t pass on the gossip, not to me, alhamdulillah, or anyone else, but he feels that just by listening to another backbiting and not correcting him he was guilty of the sin of backbiting himself.  No matter if the stomach ache was “caused” by him finishing off a bowl of the kids’ food that had sat too long on the counter or a fast food folly, the illness was a strong reminder from Allah that when you talk about someone, it is likened to eating the flesh of your brother, and you can imagine what kind of a bellyache that would give you.

It wasn’t the only incident of backbiting we had this weekend.  SubhanAllah, we grow up thinking that women are the quintessential gossips, but just this morning we had another lesson that men can be just as bad about backbiting one another.  My husband called me and told me that a complete stranger called him this morning, demanding to know why he, my husband, had been talking about him and his wife.  My husband was dumbfounded and had to ask who this guy was.  I’m So-and-so, he said.  I don’t know you, my husband replied, so how can I talk about you?  But your friend So-and-so said that you went to the masjid and were talking about me and my wife…. Turns out, a mutual acquaintance, who didn’t know this guy well either, had said the brother was having issues with his wife and could my husband, who is considered a person to go to for advice on Islamic issues, talk to them.  My husband demurred and said it would be better if some relatives and people from the couple’s country took care of it because they would better understand the situation, and he talked to a friend of his from their country and gave him the number of the young couple to call.  End of story.  So somehow, my husband’s momentary involvement with someone once removed from this couple ended up with him supposedly gossiping about them in the masjid.  Fortunately, this was a reasonable man and it didn’t take long for him to realize that the mutual acquaintance was the one at fault, and he ended the phone conversation on good terms with my hubby and inshaAllah they might even meet at the masjid and get to know one another in a proper manner.  Do I need to tell you that the next call my husband made was to tell the gossiper that he was no longer welcome in our lives?  It was not the first time he had carried gossip and Allah only knows what stories might already be circulating about my family from the mouth of this man.  May Allah give him hedayah.

This has been a weekend for lessons on backbiting.  First of all, you can feel how destructive it is.  If the psychological damage were always translated to physical distress, to a wrenching pain in the gut and nausea and a throbbing skull, people would be much less eager to pass on the latest tale told round the water cooler (or on that modern water cooler called Facebook).  Gossip changes people, damages relationships.  My husband now knows something about a friend that causes him to see him in a negative light, and he’ll never be able to take that knowledge out of his head.   He almost had an enemy in someone he’d never even met, and he severed a relationship with another due to a breach of trust.  Carrying gossip is like taking a feather pillow and tearing it open, then casting all the feathers into a stiff breeze.  There’s no way you can ever gather back all that was let loose.

So, next time someone wants to offer you a juicy tale, just stop him or her.  Just say “Now, now, that’s not really any of my business, so I’d rather not hear about it”.  As long as it’s not something dangerous, like little Johnny tying firecrackers to cats’ tails, or someone abusing his wife or a grownup hurting a child.  You have to have some judgment as to what is informational and necessary and what is damaging and malicious.   If you think about it and you can’t find any benefit in telling, then stop the gossip and don’t listen to it, and of course don’t pass it on.  Not to your neighbor, not to your friend, not to your spouse.  Let it die.  Think about times you’ve been on the receiving end of gossip and how bad it made you feel.  Feel compassion for a fellow struggling human being and think of all the sins you commit that Allah covers over and keeps from being exposed.  Yeah, I get a bad shiver at that.  Stop and think, and remain silent, no matter how tempting or juicy the story is.  You don’t want to eat the flesh of your brother or sister, do you?  Neither do I.

What do you do when you can’t do anything?

I have so many friends who are watching the horrendous violence unfold in Syria.  We feel helpless, voyeurs to massacre on the other side of the world, but as close as our hi-def big-screen TVs.  What can we do?  What can I do?  What can anyone do?

This is always the question.  I saw hungry children in Africa.  What can I do?  I watched a story about child prostitutes in Thailand.  What can I do?  I saw Israeli tanks blasting chunks out of a building in Gaza and rolling over olive groves.  What can I do?  I saw starving dogs rescued from a puppy mill.  What can I do?

We can’t always do something.  Sometimes we can.  My family has been able to donate some money to worthy causes, like famine relief in Africa or earthquake relief in Pakistan.  We certainly can’t do anything “on the ground”.  We can’t hop on an airplane and fly to Africa or India or Syria and drag people away from chaos and disaster.  We can’t shut down an abortion clinic in Calcutta or swoop down to rescue orphans from hard labor in some village somewhere else.  What can I do?  Can I call my congressman?  Can I write a blog post to raise awareness?  Can I take my Starbucks money and send it to an orphanage instead?  What can I do?

This feeling of helplessness is not fun.  I know I feel like I should be doing SOMETHING, anything to help those poor starving people in Africa, or the besieged citizens of Homs, or those unwanted girls in the villages of India, or the child slaves or the mentally ill being abused or the abused animals or the polluted land.  Pick a disaster; unfortunately there are plenty from which to choose.

So what can I do?  What can you do?  Well, I’m a big advocate of “think globally, act locally”.  If you can’t help a person halfway across the world, then maybe you can help someone a little closer to home.  You can volunteer in your community and make a big difference in someone’s life.  You can work at a food pantry.  You can go out into the community to feed the homeless.  You can start a coat drive.  You can teach youngsters how to grow food in a small garden.  You can tutor a homeless child.

Well, but I’m not saving a LIFE, you say.  I might be helping reduce misery in the world just a little bit, but I’m not feeding a starving child, merely a hungry homeless guy who might be a drunk or a drug addict anyway.  I’m not keeping a destitute woman from dying of exposure, but only setting up a cot to make a street person more comfortable.  I’m not stopping a tyrant from killing an entire village, I’m just knitting hats for preemie babies at the hospital.  I’m not doing much of anything, so why do anything?  I’m not saving a life.

You don’t know the result of any good deed that you do.  That bowl of soup you hand out to the homeless guy may be less important than the kind smile you offer him.  He might see that smile and finally realize he’s still a human being.  That smile might propel him to toss away his bottle of booze, get clean and sober, and get off the street.

You might not be saving the life of the homeless woman in the shelter when you set up that cot, but she might see the effort you make, the compassion in your eyes, and muster the courage to make it through one more day.  She might see that you picked up her child’s fallen toy and carefully dusted it off before giving it back, and realize that she can dust herself off as well and keep going for her sake.

You might not be saving the life of the poor family that needs to come to the food pantry to get enough groceries to make it to the end of the month, but the father who is ashamed to not be able to feed his kids might feel the pat on the back that you give him and realize that he has the strength to go on and keep looking for work because there are people who care about him and he is not alone.  He’ll be grateful that you put in a box of cookies for the kids along with the practical pasta and beans.

You might not be saving the life of the middle schooler who looks to you to teach her remedial math, but she might realize that there’s an adult who believes in her and she might then come to believe in herself, and to learn to love school, and to not get pregnant and drop out and end up on the dole.

Saving a life is not always about saving a life.  Saving a life is not always about saving a physical body.  Saving a life is often about saving a soul, helping a person who is not in immediate danger of death, but whose soul is dying bit by bit and in need of revival.  By offering a compassionate smile, a kind word, a warm coat, a bowl of soup, a hand up, a lesson, a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen, you might save a soul today and a life twenty years on down the line.

I won’t pretend it’s not frustrating to look at all the chaos and death going on in the world and not be doing anything about it.  I won’t pretend that children won’t die in Syria because of what I’m doing in Virginia.  I won’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt to see a frail child on TV looking out at me on what may be the day of his death due to starvation.  We are human and we are compassionate and yes, we should shed tears at such sights.  And if we can help, we should.  If we can give up that venti mocha latte and send the money to Somalia, or Pakistan, or to our poor cousin in Egypt who needs an operation, we should indeed do that.  We are not totally helpless and some of us can do a little, and some can do more.  But we can’t let our inability to help over there paralyze us so we don’t do anything over here.  And just because we live in the “first world” and it may seem that our people in need are not in as desperate straits as people who are literally living on the edge of death, that doesn’t mean that what we do here is less important.  EVERY act of compassion is important.  So find out what the needs are in your community and then do what you can to help.  Whether you are a professional businessman or a stay at home mom, there is something you can do.  Money or no money, there is help you can give.  You have a talent, an ability, a thing that you do that is uniquely you that you can use to help benefit someone else.  Figure out what it is and then go do something.  Just do something.  You might be saving a life and not even know it.  Even if you’re just serving a bowl of soup or knitting a hat.