Muslims and Conspicuous Compassion

Patrick West’s Conspicuous Compassion is an excellent book about a cultural phenomena that seems to affect many of us living in the West. That affliction is an obsession with conspicuous expressions of emotion. We now see people given to wearing empathy ribbons that declare their ’support’ for various causes; piles of flowers for deceased celebrities such as Princess Diana; public mourning over murdered children; apologies for historical misconduct such as the transatlantic slave trade or treatment of aboriginals; and vague demonstrations against ‘third world debt’ and, most poignantly, ‘war’.

One reason, West argues, for our infatuation with these sorts of public displays of emotion is that they provide us with a sense of belonging. At a time when community, family and the church have essentially lost their social value, many of us look to other means of forming social bonds and participation in public expressions of grief, anger or other emotions is one such means. For example, the ridiculous and exaggerated outpourings of emotion that accompanied the death of Princess Diana. As West observed:

Mourning sickness is a religion for the lonely crowd that no longer subscribes to orthodox churches. Its flowers and teddies are its rites, its collective minutes’ silences its liturgy and mass. But these new bonds are phoney, ephemeral and cynical.

A second, and perhaps more important reason, is that these sorts of behaviours and activities announce proudly to the world how ‘caring’ we are. The person who wears a yellow awareness ribbon, for example, is advertising that he or she ‘cares’ about cancer (particularly bladder cancer), liver disease and liver cancer, missing persons, MIA soldiers, POW soldiers, Gulf War soldiers, soldiers that are currently serving, equality endometriosis, teenage suicide, spina bifida, adoptive parents, sarcoma, hydrocephalus, hope, or sarcoma (take your pick). If, on the other hand, a person wears a green ribbon then he or she is advertising that they care about health, ecology, organ donation, prostate cancer, the right of adoptees to gain access to adoption records, depression, safe driving, roadway construction workers, growth and glaucoma (amongst other things). Anyway, you get the idea.

I recalled West’s book and his diagnosis in recent days when I was bombarded with the usual emails advertising various anti-war rallies and then, as always seems to be the case, the sanctimonious accusations of some supporters of these rallies that we would all somehow be ‘accountable’ to Allah for not attending or supporting them. It seemed to me that something of West’s assessment applied as much to Australian Muslims as it did to contemporary post-Diana Britain.

The following message, excerpted below, that was forwarded to me is typical of those that now circulate in our community:

What are you doing about the world issues? If it is only crying, than that is just not good enough. We all will be questioned by Allah (SWT) about every word we speak let alone each action we take and don’t take. Today may be your last day, are you prepared how you will answer on the day of judgement about what role you played?

We are sitting back in the comfort of our houses, watching our brothers and sisters in absolute despair. What are we doing? We must not let what we see and what we hear become our ‘normality’, we must not get use to seeing and hearing these things. Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon to name a few countries but the question, who will be next?

The non Muslims, who are not even living their lives with the knowledge that they will be accountable for all their actions, they are out their at rally’s protesting, ringing embassies, telephoning politicians and companies, boycotting and much more. They finish one thing then no sooner is it over then they are meeting to organize their next agenda. You should see them handing out pamphlets and telling people what is really going on in the world which we Muslims have long long known. And I ask you what are you doing?

No action is too small. I urge you all to act. We must fear Allah (SWT) and only Allah (SWT) just as we trust in Allah (SWT) alone. You have no excuses, there are no excuses, get up and do something. We are equipped with all what we need and more Alhumdu lillah. Telephones, Internet, our hands and our mouths. Alhumdu lillah use them all while you have them and while you have the ability InshAllah.

Firstly, the speakers at these rallies are often drawn from a variety of political and social persuasions, such as socialists, union leaders and occasionally some religious or cultural leaders. As such, it is never the case that there is a uniform message being delivered. The socialists will argue that socialism is the cure to the problems of the Middle East, whereas the Muslims will argue that Islam is. The union leaders will wax lyrical about the struggle of the workers and why this is a ‘class issue’, whilst the cultural leaders will make pleas, like Rodney King, for ‘everyone to just get along’. The only thing that seems consistent is that all of them are opposed to the war for their own diverse reasons.

As such, rallies seem to be of little political benefit: as the rallies last weekend in memorial of both the Hiroshima bombing and opposing the war on Lebanon demonstrate the messages are always convoluted; solutions are rarely proposed; and the domination of such rallies by political ideologies anathema to our own means that we are effectively used as protest fodder by causes and movements that we don’t subscribe to. The reality is that anti-war rallies don’t stop wars, and anti-war rallies in countries such as Australia that are not participants in the war are even less likely to have an effect. On every occasion that I have had to discuss this with advocates of the rallies, they admit that this is true. However, they mitigate the failure of protest politics to stop wars by arguing that it is still necessary to voice one’s opinion and speak out against what is happening.

Despite that, as the previously excerpted email shows, many Muslims have elevated the importance of these events to the point that they are now casting judgement on people’s concern for an issue based on their participation. If you are not protesting then, implicitly, you are sitting at home doing nothing and not caring sufficiently about your brethren abroad.

Another email distributed to a number of Muslim mailing lists reads:

It is absolutly useless sitting in front of the T.V.watching the news 24-7 and feeling sorry for ourselves. Be pro-active, do sumthig about the injustces happening to our brothers/sisters in Lebanon and Palestine.

This notion that rallying is better than doing nothing (as though that is the only alternative) betrays the ultimately selfish motivation behind some of these more aggressive calls to protest. Rallies might not achieve much politically, but they allow people to feel that they are ’speaking out’, ‘doing something’ and ‘being pro-active’. They allow people to engage in ostentatious caring: waving placards, chanting slogans, and proudly advertising to the world their disapproval (as though their opinion really matters). They allow people to claim a higher moral ground to those of us who prefer to keep our concern private: accusing others of not caring to the same degree because they don’t participate in these carnivals of compassion. They are also free. It doesn’t require the investment of anything more than one’s Sunday afternoon in order to achieve the warm afterglow of having ‘done something’.

Of course, not everybody that attends a rally holds this mindset. However, it is difficult to reconcile the increasingly emotional and aggressive demands that we protest with the obvious ineffectiveness of rallying as a means of political change. In these cases, it seems that the protest satisfies a personal need first and foremost: the need to feel that one cares about others. However, as West wrly observed, when some people advertise that they care, often the real people they care about are themselves.