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.