Faith Without Empathy Is Like a Body Without a Soul

Last updated on: December 2, 2016 at 10:14 pm by Khwaja Khusro Tariq

Faith Without Empathy Is Like a Body Without a Soul 2016-12-02T22:14:13-04:00 Khwaja Khusro Tariq

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This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post

One of my first clear memories is a conversation with my father during a family visit to Masai Maara, Kenya. I had asked my father on arriving why some of the Masai women were bare-breasted and why this did not embarrass or shame them. My father responded that in my shorts, shirt and suspenders I probably looked absurd to the Masai, and that what they wore was to them, perfectly appropriate attire. It was clear to me that he was displeased by this moral judgment on my part. This was confusing to my five year old self but after a while the notion of differing conceptions of normal did sink in. I spent the rest of the trip being fascinated by these beautiful people in their bright red attire and magnificent headdresses.

I will return to Masai Maara, bear with me.

One of my favorite childhood books was a magical little novella called “The Seas of Morning”. It was about the son of a wealthy merchant whose boyhood dream is to fight with the Knights of St John at the Island of Rhodes. I spent many a bedtime pretending I was young Dick Stockton sailing the high seas and fighting the Ottomans. At some point I became aware that as a Muslim I was in this instance, rooting for the “wrong” side. It didn’t matter; young Richard still captivated me with his courage and lust for adventure. I could still step into his shoes.

I will return to the Island of Rhodes, bear with me.

Before all else, faith was my mother kneeling at her prayers; it was my mother reading the Quran softly but audibly. Then, it was the handful of Quranic verses I was taught at school and the stories about the life of Prophet Mohammad in my Islamic Studies textbook. It was the mosque where I would go to say my Eid prayers. These were the beginnings of a spiritual alchemy that all people of faith experience. Parents, places of worship, scripture- all little fragments of divinity that began creating in me a sense of the sacred that continues to permeate all that I experience. In the otherworldly peak of Kilamanjaro, in the waves of the Arabian Sea and in the mournful cry of the loon l continue to see and hear the expression of the will of their creator.

I return now to Masai Maara and the Island of Rhodes. To my earliest yet most abiding lessons in empathy and moral relativism. Ideology and other aspects of human cultures are not architects of schism unless we make them so. Without the beliefs and traditions of others we would have neither diversity nor mystery in our lives. The uniqueness of our identity rests on the uniqueness of the identity of others.

Today I am told civilizations are clashing and that for those of faith ideological fidelity trumps all other loyalties. But both my rational and emotive experience informs me otherwise. I still marvel at indigenous cultures and wish fervently that they do not fade away, that they yield to no other tradition including my own. I can still step into the soul of young Dick Stockton and fight in the siege of Rhodes. I have been able to hold the tension of these opposites and they have enriched my imagination and my ability to relate to a tradition beyond me own.

It is not beliefs that threaten us. It is not in the infallibility of deities and scriptures that our problems lie but in our own fallibility. We remain easy prey for demagogues because we presume that civilization has ensured that our instincts no longer hold sway over us. That it must be some poisonous well of ideas diametrically opposed to our own that the monsters that threaten us arise from. We forget that violence dwells within us and that fear and hatred are its nourishment.
Perhaps we also know what can vanquish it.

Empathy may be an innate ability we are born with varying capacities for — but it must also be taught, nurtured and exemplified. Let us start with our children; let us start with ourselves.

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