Local Lessons

The title of my khutbah today is “Local Lessons”.

I’ll start with the story of Jonah from the Quran: “And truly Jonah was of the ones who were sent when he fled from his people to the laden boat. He cast lots with them and he had been of the ones who were refuted. Then the Fish engulfed him while he was the one who is answerable. If he had not been of the ones who glorify, he would have lingered in expectation in its belly until the Day they are raised up. Then We cast him forth on the naked shore while he was ill. We caused a plant of gourd to develop over him. We sent him to a community of a hundred thousand or they even exceed that. And they had believed so We gave them enjoyment for a while.” (37: 139- 149)

Out of all the prophets in the Quran, Jonah was – by far- the most reluctant. Running away from his mission, boarding a ship, and if that wasn’t far enough, getting swallowed by a great fish or whale. Now at the bottom of a cold, dark ocean, inside a slimy fish- probably smelled pretty bad, completely alone, completely isolated-but he’s alive. Miserable, but alive. The only way he could get out of his predicament was to praise the One whom he had denied- God. The praise got him out, and now Jonah was obligated to face his mission. And so this most reluctant of all prophets, became the most successful of all prophets. His message reached his community and they were spared destruction- for a time.

Jonah comes up again in a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad. In a disastrous early mission, Prophet Muhammad and his adopted son Zayd, traveled to Ta’if. The citizens of Ta’if refused to listen to the message, and Prophet Muhammad and Zayd were run out of town by street children throwing rocks at them. They were throwing a lot of rocks, the men were bleeding. They found refuge outside the town in the orchards of Utbah and Shaybah, from the Quraysh tribe. Feeling sorry for their fellow Meccans, they sent their servant Addas to give the men some grapes. When the servant Addas heard the Prophet say “Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Reheem” , he was curious and started up a conversation with Prophet Muhammad. When Muhammad asked him where he was from, Addas said, “Nineveh” and Prophet replied” The town of Jonah the just, son of Amittai!” Addas was shocked that an Arab knew of Jonah, so he asked Prophet about Jonah. Prophet replied, “We are brothers. Jonah was a Prophet of God, and I am a Prophet of God.” When Addas heard this, he converted to Islam.  And I’m sure that for the Prophet, bruised and battered from his encounter at Ta’if, he felt this citizen from Jonah’s town offering him refreshment, was surely an ayat from God , telling him to stay the course, stay on the path.

I’ve started with these stories about Jonah, the reluctant prophet, because I can identify with them to a certain extent. I think everyone here knows, or if you don’t you will soon be hearing about it, that since January I have reluctantly become involved in a local political campaign. It has taken up a tremendous amount of my time and energy, and it will continue to do so until April 2, election day. At least I have a deadline. I definitely had a choice here. I could have stayed at home and not get involved. I don’t like talking up strangers and I hate confrontation. However, I feel that this particular issue- funding public school education- is tremendously important to my family and my community on many levels, and so I feel an obligation to be involved. My mother was a public school teacher, and in following the ‘pay it forward’ philosophy, I need to get involved. I have seen what happens to communities when public education is not funded properly- this goes back to my home state of California, and the results are truly disastrous. Finally, I believe a well educated citizenry is essential to a truly healthy democracy. Demagogues and oligarchs, who do not want anything to change so as to secure and maintain their power, try their best to keep their citizens in intellectual poverty.

I have learned many lessons in joining this political campaign, some of which I will share today, particularly in the context of Quranic principles.

1.       An uphill battle

2.       Do my efforts matter?  cheerleading/ talking people off the ledge

3.       Finding humanity in them-

An uphill battle- the struggle in context. In Prophet Muhammad’s time, I believe, his society was in a period of transition. There were tribes with great wealth and privilege, a greater wealth disparity being generated by the trade routes through Mecca, and there were more people living on the fringes of society- street children unclaimed by any parent, people who belonged to low caste tribes, or no tribes at all. Slavery was widespread, and along with this privilege came abuse and mistreatment of these captive human beings. In this context of extreme inequality, Prophet Muhammad brought a new message of accountability to God, community and parental responsibility and economic reform. This was a tough sell, particularly to the privileged tribal elites. Currently in the United States, I feel we are experiencing similar upheavals and inequalities. In the book, “The Unwinding: an Inner History of the New America”, author George Packer writes:

“No one can say when the unwinding began- when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways- and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different.

     If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape- the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories in the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition- ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.

….The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever before- freedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high, marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business, have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and boast about it, fail abjectly and try again .And with freedom the unwinding brings its illusions, for all these pursuits are as fragile as thought balloons popping against circumstances. Winning and losing are all-American games, and in the unwinding winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.” Pp 3-4

This is our dunya.

My struggle, is to pass a school referendum for infrastructure repairs at the public high schools. The last time this school district passed something like this was 1962, when the voting population had gone through WW2 and understood the importance of collective effort. In 2019, we have a hard time with this concept. This is the third time the referendum is on the ballot.

George Packer explains the current attitude towards education”

“ In the midst of economic stagnation, education had become a status game, ‘purely positional and extremely decoupled’ from the question of its benefit to the individual and society.

In Silicon Valley you didn’t have to look far for evidence. The public schools that had once been the pride of California belonged to a statewide system ranked forty-eighth in the country, chronically underfunded and in crisis. Private schools had become an option for more and more families, but so had something novel in American history: a privatized public education. Schools in the prosperous towns of Silicon Valley had come to depend on massive fundraising to stay at the top. The elementary school in Woodside, with four hundred seventy kids, was supported by a foundation- begun five years after Proposition 13, in 1983, to save the job of a special ed teacher from budget cuts- that pulled in two million dollars a year.

…..A few miles away, in East Palo Alto, elementary schools had no foundations and chronically lacked textbooks and classroom supplies. In California’s public schools there was a long way to fall.

The same held true for universities. The University of California’s world-class system saw its budget cut by nearly a billion dollars, more than 25 percent, in four years, and by 2012, facing billions more in cuts, was on the verge of collapse. That year, Stanford announced that it had raised $6.2 billion in a five-year capital campaign, during a financial crisis and recession- the largest amount in the history of higher education. “ pp 391-392.

When American society has reduced the meaning of education to just another notch on the status belt, how can you convince people to follow the Quranic concept of , “Lord increase my knowledge.” (Qur’an 20:11) The Qur’an uses the word “knowledge” in various forms 854 times and many Quranic passages urge human beings to think, consider, and reason. And it is not just Quran, in the hadith tradition we have sayings such as "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave." And "Seeking Knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim male and female.'”

Public education funding is an uphill climb in today’s dunya, and I can’t help but think that battling ignorance was also a major obstacle in Prophet Muhammad’s time, given the 854 mentions of ”knowledge” in Quran.

Another aspect of my current struggle, or education jihad, is trying to convince volunteers of the value of their effort. It can be really hard to motivate even the most well intentioned people. They are reluctant to sacrifice their time. Time. Back in the Prophet’s day, people had to sacrifice their lives. Granted one’s life is different from one’s time, but a very similar attitude, “Do my efforts really count?” still applies.

In Quran, we find examples of motivating the reluctant in 2:154 “And say not of those who are slain in God’s cause, “They are dead:; nay, they are alive, but you perceive it not.

And in 3:156-158

“O you who have attained faith! Be not like those who are bent on denying the truth and say of their brethren after having set out on a long journey to faraway places or gone forth to war, ‘Had they but remained with us, they would not have died’ or ‘they would not have been slain’ – for God will cause such thought to become a source of bitter regret in their hearts, since it is God who grants life and deals death. God sees all that you do. And if indeed you are slain or die in God’s cause, then surely forgiveness from God and His grace are better than all that one could amass in this world. For indeed, if you die or are slain, it will surely be uto God that you shall be gathered.”

Even if you have a motivated core group of volunteers, there are going to be set backs. There are going to be life events that threaten to derail your campaign- sometimes in my case, it can be a volunteer having a bad conversation with a potential voter. I call this the “talking them off the ledge” conversation. People can get extremely discouraged and want to give up, particularly if they feel their efforts are not being appreciated.

I think there were times in the Prophet’s life where he felt like giving up, when he felt his efforts were wasted. It was only God’s reassurance that kept him going. Think about how many times you may have come across “talking him off the ledge” ayat? One of the earliest Meccan surahs is Al Muddaththir (The Enfolded One #74)

“O Thou enfolded! Arise and warn! And thy Sustainer’s greatness glorify! And thine inner self purify! And all defilement shun! And do not through giving seek thyself to gain, but unto thy Sustainer turn in patience. And (warn all people) that when the trumpet call is sounded, that very Day shall be a day of anguish, not of ease for all who now deny the truth. Leave Me alone to deal with him whom I have created alone, and to whom I have granted resources vast, and children as witnesses, and to whose life I gave so wide a scope. (74:1-14) “

The last thing I would like to talk about, is finding the humanity in them. What I mean by this is that in a political campaign, it is easy to have an attitude of us versus them. Unfortunately, this attitude is counter productive, because at some point you need to reach out to “them” in order to make them part of “us’.  The prophet understood this, and actively tried to create neutral spaces for conversation and decision making.

PAUSE

In any attempt to change peoples’ minds, whether this is a political campaign or a religious conversion, you have to create situations where conversations can happen. Yes, there are some people who will never listen to what you say, they are too ingrained in what they think and believe. But that is only a few people. The majority of people are unsure. They may be ignorant or they may be lazy. To get people to listen, you cannot come at them with full force zeal. Zealotry, for the undecided, it not motivating, it is simply off-putting. The energy of zealotry is too close in tone to irrationality. If you want your cause to come off as the rational choice, you have to have a calm conversation.

In the Prophet’s time, calm conversations were the outcome of the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah.  Although the Prophet’s followers thought they were getting a bad deal at the time of the treaty, the Quran immediately hailed it as a major accomplishment.

“Verily, We have laid open before thee a manifest victory.” (48:1)

Muhammad Asad notes,

“The Truce of Hudaybiyyah was to prove of the greatest importance to the future of Islam. For the first time in six years peaceful contacts were established between Mecca and Medina, and thus the way was opened to the penetration of Islamic ideas into the citadel of Arabian paganism. The Meccans who had occasion to visit the Muslim camp at Hudaybiyyah returned deeply impressed by the spirit and the unity of Muhammad’s followers, and many of them began to waver in their hostility towards the faith preached by him. As soon as the perennial warfare came to an end and people of both sides could meet freely, new converts railed around the Prophet, first in tens, then in hundreds, then in thousands- so much so that when the pagan Quraysh broke the truce two years after its concession, the Prophet could and did occupy Mecca almost without resistance. Thus, in face if not in appearance, the Truce of Hudaybiyyah ushered in the moral and political victory of Islam over all Arabia.”

I don’t know whether my education referendum will pass in April. If it doesn’t pass, it will pass at some point. The schools will go down in their ranking, property values will plunge, and people will panic. In a crisis mode, they will pass some kind of referendum. I am hoping to by-pass the crisis, but I’m not sure that will happen. Is my community like that of Jonah who listen to the warnings, or are we more like stubborn Pharaoh’s Egyptians, who needed seven plagues and then some to change their minds? I can’t say where my community falls in that spectrum, but I will do my best to “get outside the belly of the fish” and talk to my neighbors in calm conversations.

I would also say that, in some ways, I am grateful for the opportunity of this referendum. Because of this struggle, I have gotten to know some very wonderful people who I otherwise may not have met. I have learned a tremendous amount about my community and how public education is funded in this country. This knowledge and these friendships are tremendous gifts, and for that I am extremely grateful.