The fiqh related to relief work generally begins and ends with an account of the obligations of zakah and its voluntary counterpart, sadaqa. Much of the discussion on zakah is focused on the legitimate expenditures from zakah funds and the right procedures for their collection and distribution. In the present age very few, if any, of the Muslim-majority states exercise real sovereignty over their economic and political affairs, and they have even less control of the educational and cultural influences on their people. The large-scale relief efforts undertaken by Muslim states and by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) run by Muslim volunteers respond to the emergencies that arise from natural disasters and wars. The funds they are able to raise and the relief work they are able to sustain are highly dependent on how intensively and for how long the emergencies are presented in the news cycle. Again, the reality Muslims must acknowledge is that the news cycle is not under their control, though this situation has improved a little in recent decades. The Muslim-run relief programmes and their sustainment after the immediate emergency are typically modelled on the legal and administrative forms of Western NGOs, and they run similar projects, such as health clinics, provision of access to clean water, primary education, and the like. Of course such programmes are necessary, deeply appreciated by the recipients of relief, and must continue. But, just as with the relief work of Western NGOs, the work of Muslim NGOs is always ongoing: the good that they do does not appear to result in freeing the recipients of relief from their need for relief. Instead, the relief efforts appear to highlight, and perhaps even aggravate, the dependency of the recipients of relief on the different agencies, Muslim or non-Muslim, which are providing the relief.
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It hardly needs saying that the purpose of Islamic relief agencies cannot be to perpetuate Islamic relief agencies. Rather, their goal must be to establish the conditions in which the need for relief agencies is steadily reduced and the dependency of the recipients of relief comes to an end, ideally with a large contribution from their own local efforts. Everybody knows the Prophetic hadith in which a beggar is given the money to buy a rope and advised to collect firewood which he can then sell, instead of having to return to begging. This and other similar hadiths demonstrate the underlying principle: to the extent possible help persons in need to help themselves. That is the greater good, beyond short-term relief of poverty and hardship, which Islamic relief should be concerned about. However, the Western conception of relief efforts, and Western legal frameworks for that work, explicitly and formally discourage any challenge to the injustices in social and economic relations which keep the poor and needy always poor and needy. Allah has clearly said in His Book that wealth and opportunities to prosper should be freely and fairly circulated, not concentrated in the hands of the same social or ethnic group. The Islamic legal distinction, among means and ends, between halal and haram, and the commandments related to division of property under inheritance laws, are very much part of fiqh, no less important than the fiqh of zakah and sadaqa. Muslims should not be constrained by Western conceptions and practice of relief work. The intentions and actions of most volunteers in Western relief agencies may well be motivated by sincere concern and compassion for the people in need of relief, but ultimately their efforts are expressions of pity rather than compassion.
The world is on the edge of profound changes in the balance of political and economic power: the international order that has prevailed since mid-18th century, when European colonial expansion across the world became increasingly cruel and increasingly irresistible, appears to be coming to an end. Despite brutal resistance in some places, a new order is emerging, in which various Muslim polities will have a big part to play. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, we see strong efforts to establish economic and political sovereignty, to reject the ongoing plunder of their natural and human resources by former European colonial powers, and to resist the takeover of those powers by the United States after the Second World War. This is an opportunity for Islamic relief agencies to re-think their motives and re-orient their programmes so that they distinguish clearly between short-term, emergency responses to the need for relief, and long-term responses which aim to end, and not perpetuate, the need for relief.
One way to understand the difference between short-term and long-term responses to need for relief is to understand the difference between pity and compassion. These two concepts or sentiments are very complexly interlinked and therefore hard to distinguish. It will be useful to look first at another pair of interlinked concepts, whose interlinkage is not so complex, namely remorse and repentance. Remorse is feeling bad about having done something we know is wrong or harmful to oneself or others, or that we know is disapproved by God. This feeling opens the door and should lead on to repentance, the determination never to do that bad thing again, and then never doing it again. However, as we all know, it is possible to feel remorse while still desiring and intending, perhaps even planning, to do the bad thing again. In other words, though remorse opens the door to repentance, it does not naturally flow into it. Rather, there is a need for a conscious decision and focused effort to pass through that door and realise repentance. Those who get stuck in remorse can become addicted to it: they look forward to the remorse as well as looking forward to doing the bad thing. Over time remorse may, perversely, flavour and enrich the enjoyment of what is then experienced as a ‘guilty pleasure’ or ‘pleasurable guilt’. This does not make remorse itself a bad thing. Remorse is a good thing always because it is the doorway to repentance. Even for those who habitually refuse to step through that doorway, it remains open until the close approach of the individual’s death, whereupon it is too late.
The relation between pity and compassion is similar but more complicated. Pity is what we naturally feel when we see someone else in trouble. This feeling quickly and naturally becomes an impulse to help lessen or end the trouble. The mechanism generating this feeling is the capacity to mirror in one’s own self the experience and situation that is presented to us in another person. This capacity, where in the brains it happens, and how exactly the so-called ‘mirror neurones’ do what they do, is not yet well understood. It is most likely that capacity underlies our ability to understand what someone else means, whether they speak effectively or not, and sometimes even when they do not speak; somehow, we already know more or less what they are feeling or thinking. Being able to feel what a person in trouble is feeling sparks the impulse to help them. Suffering what someone else is suffering is the root meaning of the English word ‘compassion’, namely ‘suffering with’. But there is a complication.
While the brain mirrors what another is suffering it does not stop being aware that the other is the one suffering, not oneself. Since in principle suffering is undesirable, there is an impulse to turn away from it. Then, instead of the feeling of pity flowing naturally into the feeling of compassion, the witness to suffering may become aware of their own exemption from that suffering, and experience instead a sense of superiority inasmuch as they are able to help the other, but the other is not in any position to help them. God has made us in such a way that pity opens the door to compassion and naturally flows into compassion –– unlike the relation between remorse and repentance, compassion flows naturally, it does not require a particular resolve and decision for pity to switch on compassion. However, God has also permitted Shaytan, until the end of time, to lay ambushes for humankind, and Shaytan has developed many stratagems to block that natural flow. For example, Shaytan will focus our attention on out being in a socially superior position, the position of help-giver and not help-recipient. Then, questions flood into the heart and perplex the impulse to compassion: does the recipient really deserve to be helped, and how much help would be appropriate, and so on. In the best case of such shaytani influence, what the Western media call ‘compassion fatigue’ sets in: surely, we tell ourselves, we have already done enough, we have done our part; we cannot do more, the need is just too great; etc. In the worst case of shaytani influence, ‘compassion refusal’ or ‘reversal’ sets in: this is the position of those reported in the Quran as saying: if God wanted these people to be fed, He would have fed them directly, or created for them circumstances in which they could feed themselves; these needy people are not our problem. Because pity has not been permitted to flow into compassion, pity itself erodes and disappears, and then, instead of pity, people feel something like contempt for the needy even though they may be too well-mannered to give expression to this contempt. Either way, their behaviour shows that they do not care, not really.
This self-exclusion from pity and compassion sooner or later turns into an incurable self-centredness, that is, a determined, enduring self-exclusion from any dependency on compassion, on the grace of God; people rely instead on their own strength, individual or collective, on their rationality, their efficiency and industriousness in exploiting the natural and human resources around them. Although it is obvious that the ground of there being any existence at all, let alone, sentient life, and especially the intelligibility to sentient human life of what happens in the world, is the rahma of Allah –– even the most determined atheists know that they did not create themselves, that they are indebted creatures, indebted to parents and family, to society, to the whole, vast span of heavens and earth –– although all this is obvious and obviously real, unbelievers will deny this rahma. In so doing, they affirm their kufr, they cover up the truth with theories like all existence is the product of chance collisions of particles moving at random. Even if that were true at the level of subatomic particles –– and it can be true only in light of our restricted observations and mathematical accounts of those collisions –– it cannot be true of the reality we experience as human beings, as individuated assemblages, at some certain time and place, of subatomic articles. Each of those assemblages is fully self-conscious, and fully capable of interacting with the self-consciousness of other assemblages of the same, human kind.
I have explained elsewhere that the fundamental assumption of modern Western economics, namely the scarcity of resources and the necessity of a pitiless competition to seize (and exhaust) those resources is false. The assumption is often expressed as ‘life is a jungle’; ‘it is dog-eat-dog world’, etc. In reality, the rich diversity of a jungle happens through the emergence over time of complex interactionof co-operativeness among different elements of inanimate and animate existence. Competition occurs within the co-operativeness: it broadens, magnifies, and intensifies the quality of the different life-forms, so that they diversify and entangle, re-diversify, re-entangle, and spread out little by little: the jungle is not an absence of moral order, but the presence of a moral order more richly and profoundly integrated than suits the narrow aspirations of human economic effort. Only human beings over-eat, over-produce, over-consume, to the point, way beyond satisfaction, of toxicity, of poisoning themselves and poisoning the jungle itself. As for the dog-eat-dog metaphor. Yes, dogs will fight over the same bone, and the dog who loses the fight will go hungry, and be emotionally and physically weakened before the next fight. But more often than not, fighting gestures and noises substitute for actual fighting, so that the ‘competition for resources’ is at worst only lethal, not fatal. So the dog who loses lives to fight another day, another, better fight. Again, only humans take this competition beyond the symbolic or mildly lethal level; they seem to need to kill off the competition, to take everything into self-centred ownership, convert everything into commodity and property, and actively prevent others from sharing in it. This mind-set is the absolute opposite to the grace of God, which gives to these as well as those, and which looks (to the religiously infirm) like randomness, an arbitrary distribution. If and when infected by Shaytan, the same mind-set becomes a prison of personal or national/cultural or racial pride: I/we are inherently better than them: we are entitled to rob them of their past and future; we are entitled to reduce them to a near-permanent servitude to our interests, our tastes, and our whims.
The grand gestures of philanthropists so characteristic of wealthy elites –– the support for food and water distribution, for sciences and arts, and for sports and other distractions –– have been, among the elites of Western civilisations, especially cynical. Under both Greek and Roman imperialisms, conquering generals, political administrators, owners of large land-holdings, and controllers of trade routes and of tribute- or tax-incomes, were expected to fund costly religious ceremonies for the general public, and these could include lavish food distribution, gifts of money, and distractions like sports festivals. The purpose of this philanthropy is to please the mass of people, to project a positive brand image for the donor, and to prevent the recipients of the largesse from resisting their deprivation by the individual donor or by the class of donors. Examples of such behaviour could easily be presented from Islamic history, and yet it has never been a settled characteristic of Islamic civilisation in general.
Christianity developed the earlier pre-Christian notion that the gods (spitefully) deprived human beings of immortality and other superpowers but allowed them to become ‘as gods’, to live (after death) like stars in the heavens, if they excelled in life, as warrior-heroes or sports-heroes or champions of some other sort –– these who did not excel (all humans except a handful), and defy the limitations the gods had imposed on them, lived on as shadows or shades of themselves in a space, distinct from the earth and distinct from the habitations of the gods. somewhere below or deep inside the earth. By divinising Christ, and building a dramatic narrative (seemingly modelled on comparable dramatic narratives in Greek literature) wherein Christ’s non-combative response to evil demonstrates God’s (ultimately) forgiving nature, Christianity divinised pity, separating it radically from compassion. God pities humankind (having created them pitiable) and by dying for them somehow liberates them from their humanity, transforming their suffering into a state that transcends their humanity. This teaching underwent a long evolution not relevant here. What is relevant here is that, in Christian practice (which persists in post- and ex-Christian social and legal forms), the political, military effort of plundering the resources of others is regarded as just the way the world is, its ‘evil’, which cannot be escaped. However, its worst consequences can be mitigated by acts of pity towards the victims or ‘losers’. Thus it is commonplace to observe nations and corporations operating within political and economic structures, laws, and practices which systematically and enduringly deprive others of the benefits of their natural or labour resources, while also, separately, pitying them and arranging for occasional hand-outs to mitigate the effects of the misery and servitude imposed on them. Making an unconscionably large profit and being philanthropic with it are regarded as radically separate human efforts. Thus, for example, after profiting for centuries from the most brutal and cruel form of human slavery, and complimenting themselves on the great civilisational enterprises they were able to undertake as a result of this compelled labour, Western politicians proceeded to compliment themselves on their humanity (their superior humanity) by making the slave trade, and then slavery itself, illegal. The quality of compassion felt for the slaves may be judged from, first, the fact that slave-owners, not slaves, were compensated for the ending of this economic practice; second, from the fact that the abolition process began and matured simultaneously with the introduction of machinery that could more profitably replace slave labour; third, from the fact that, within fifty years of abolition, the principal source of slaves, Africa was subjected to the most brutal colonisation, entailing genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc. on a scale comparable to what was done in America and Australia; and fourth by the fact that the pseudo-scientific nonsense of ‘superior humanity’ is as vigorously practised as it is vigorously denied. Look
at Palestine, Gaza particularly, if you think this is over-stating the case.
Islamic relief agencies cannot operate within a framework other than the one where pity substitutes for and replaces compassion, where the need for relief is met short-term, crisis by crisis, but the conditions underlying such need are not addressed. It is very wrong to accuse Western charitable endeavours of being hypocritical. They are not; they can be, and mostly are, perfectly sincere. The point I am making is that those endeavours are in themselves, structurally and formally, misdirected, intended to address the sights and sounds that human suffering makes, which upset us (because Allah is rahman and rahim), but which are not intended to end that suffering properly and enduringly. Until the Muslim peoples of the world attain a much larger measure of political, economic and cultural sovereignty, than is currently possible, Islamic relief agencies must continue to do the good that they are doing. But while doing it, they can desire what is better than that, and worthier of their Islamic heritage. The contacts their volunteers make among the people they are helping can provide them with information that relates to reforms (in governance, in land and water usage, in infrastructure development and the like) which might assure future economic prosperity. Even within the rules constraining NGOs, NGOs can and do collate such information in the form of reports that can inform Muslim donors as to what the whole relief effort should be aiming for. At the same time, these same reports can be a basis for encouraging Muslims living in some degree of prosperity to make common cause with the recipients of their donations through specific acts of economic solidarity: identify with them, look for opportunities to help them help themselves; figuratively, provide them with the rope that they can use to bundle firewood and not have to beg.
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