Struggling, and Finding Compassion

By Na’eem Jeenah

It was a few years ago. We had just finished the Jum’a, the Friday communal prayer, and were leaving the mosque. Seeing the great South African poet and anti-Apartheid activist Omaruddin Don Mattera, I went to greet him. As usual, he embraced me warmly and, his face glowing, said, “You used the word ‘compassion’ five times in your khutbah; I was counting.”

I was taken aback. I didn’t expect anyone to count any word that I used in my khutbah. I certainly had no idea how many times I said “compassion.”

He added, “I often think of your wife. She epitomized compassion.”

Then, in what seemed like a determined effort to embarrass me, he said more loudly to no one in particular (which he repeated on another occasion), “I remember him from when he was a young angry man, always talking about fighting. Now he talks about compassion.”

He beamed, sounding like a proud parent showing off what he thought was a smart trick his child had learned. And why not?

My first meeting with Don Mattera was when Fuad Hendricks, then editor of the South African Muslim newspaper Al-Qalam, took me to a Black Consciousness (BC) meeting. And Don was there! A teenager thinking he was engaged in struggle, I couldn’t wait to meet him. But it was a let-down.

Instead of talking about important things like the meaning of being Black or the implications of being a Muslim and in the BC movement, he talked to us about… compassion. He gave a long story about how he became a Muslim, attracted not by Islam’s stand on justice and fighting against oppression (as I had thought) but by the basmala, the fact that the statement that Muslims repeat before doing anything is about the Compassion of Allah.

Strange, I thought. This was the ‘80s, the heady days of struggle, of revolution, of fighting against the oppressor pharaohs of Apartheid. And here was this tower of the struggle going all soft. Sad, really.

I remembered all this recently as I participated in the online and radio debates about the recent article by Lubna Nadvi. And I cringed. Cringed at the way that this Islam of compassion was being presented. Cringed at the way that the Messenger of Allah (s), my model, my example, my leader, my inspiration, the human being whose life gives meaning to mine was being painted as a warmonger, as someone whose main preoccupation seemed to be to wage war and to chop off people’s heads.

I couldn’t recognize the Nabi Muhammad (s) in this painting. The canvas showed only a warlord, a vengeful person who wanted to mutilate 70 bodies because his uncle’s was mutilated, who wanted to take children to war, who beheaded people. And this painting was not by “the enemies of Islam” but by Muslims.

Is this who the Prophet (s) was, I wondered, knowing that it wasn’t. This couldn’t be the one who Allah calls rahmatan lil-‘alamin, a mercy unto all the worlds. The picture I was seeing was not one of mercy.

What happened to the man who, when asked by a Bedouin, “Do you kiss your children? We do not kiss our children,” replied, “What can I do if Allah has not put compassion into your hearts?” Who cried so much for humanity that it is said he had two tear-lines down his face? Who, after being stoned and humiliated in Taif, and then being asked by an angel whether he wanted the mountains to crush Taif’s people, replied, “No, for I hope that there shall be among their children those who will serve Allah alone”? Who laughed as he joked with his companions – women and men? Who visited the non-Muslim woman, when she was ill, who had repeatedly abused him? Who forgave everyone after the conquest of Makka – including the woman who had mutilated the body of his uncle Hamza?

Was this not the Prophet (s) we should be thinking about?

“The umma is in a state of war,” we are told. And so we have to be cruel and angry and behead Nepalese cleaners or kidnap French journalists or murder Russian schoolchildren. Was not the Prophet (s) in a virtually perpetual state of war in Madina? Why could he still be kind and sensitive and forgiving and loving in the midst of struggle and we cannot?

Is it perhaps because his mission was mercy and compassion, not war?

Rahmatan lil-alamin is God’s description of him. This mercy unto all the worlds never said, as we are now being told, that there “should be only two types of people in this world” – Muslims and dhimmis (non-Muslim citizens of an Islamic state who pay the jizya tax) – and that all others must be “annihilated.” The Prophet that I love and follow was not into ethnic cleansing.

It is a tragedy that at a time when Islam and Muslims are being maligned all over the world, there are those among us who want to reinforce the negative stereotypes of our Leader (s). His life story must be liberated from those who want to only make war and it must be restored with all its subtlety, sensitivity and beauty to what it was – the life of Rahmatan lil-alamin. I am tired of having his sunna presented to us as a sunna of hate – whether by Muslims or by non-Muslims. I will not stand for it. And no Muslim should stand for it.

It took a long time for this “young angry man always talking about fighting” to truly understand and appreciate what rahmatan lil-alamin means. A long time, the inspiration of people like Bra Don Mattera and that “epitome of compassion,” my wife, Shamima Shaikh and, most importantly, the Grace and Compassion of The Most Compassionate and the Most Merciful – Al-Rahman, Al-Rahim.

Na’eem Jeenah is President of the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa and lecturer in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

A Version of this article appeared in Al-Qalam, South Africa's Muslim newspaper.