With the presidential race so tight, I am pondering what an appropriate response to a Trump victory would look like. Trump has been so divisive and unhinged, and issued enough warnings and threats, that we all should be preparing for a nonviolent but determined resistance.
The American Muslim community better assume that it will not be spared the unleashed forces of bigotry. The attitude that Muslims survived one Trump term and can survive another is careless thinking.
Considering that the Nation may be in for some truly dark times, it is mind-boggling the number of Muslim leaders who want to see Kamala Harris lose, and are pushing the Green Party ticket.
The Abandon Harris movement wants to punish Kamala Harris for her failure to distance herself from Joe Biden’s sponsorship of Netanyahu’s war on the Palestinians. In their deep frustration and anger over the year-long massacre in Gaza, some have said or implied that any Muslims who would vote instead for Harris to forestall a greater evil are “sell outs”.
But should the movement succeed, the Palestinians will be in far worse shape, Netanyahu will be completely unchecked, and a very sick and vengeful man will regain the White House.
Is this the best American Muslims can do? No.
Other Muslim leaders and organizations have been more thoughtful and nuanced. Some readers would respond that this is no time for nuance. But nuance is an improvement over an out-and-out counterproductive strategy, which the Abandon Harris movement most definitely is.
The Uncommitted movement, while it specifically did not endorse Harris, did clearly imply that there is no other vote that makes sense. So frightening is the prospect of a second Trump term.
Two Muslims have told me that in their states, Texas (red) and Colorado (blue), it will make no difference for Harris if they vote Green. But Jill Stein cannot win, and voting for Harris even if you are convinced it will not change the outcome for your state, will at least allow you to honestly say: “Madam, President, I voted for you to avert a greater evil, and now I expect you to forge a new way forward on Palestine and Israel.”
But in the swing states, where it will count the most, there is only one vote that meets the demands of the hour.
Please, all of you who intend to vote for Jill Stein: the Palestinians cannot afford you acting solely out of moral clarity.
As I say often, politics is the art of the possible. Let’s give the rest of the country a civics lesson. Let’s hold our noses and do the right thing for the Nation.
Brothers, after a year of watching genocide unfold in Palestine, abandoning Harris feels right to you. But how will you feel when Donald Trump begins enacting everything he has promised?
Though none of us can know the mind of Allah, failure to think through the likely consequences of our actions may very well nullify our good intentions.
I fear that the five of you and the many other Muslim leaders who have joined the Abandon Harris movement are doing a disservice to Palestinians and American Muslims. The letter four of you have signed urging Muslims and their allies to vote third party for the presidential ticket states, “We are not choosing between a lesser and greater evil; we are staring down two monstrous evils.” And yet, one clearly is greater than the other.
Elsewhere your letter states: “We are fully aware of the threats a Trump presidency poses to this country on the domestic front.” The concluding paragraph refers to Israel’s war on the Palestinians as “the greatest catastrophe in modern history”, and states that the Republican promise is to “only worsen this evil”.
What you advocate will improve the chances of a very sick, vengeful, and dangerous man regaining the White House.
I beg of you, brothers, to re-think this one.
Yes, the Democratic Party has failed the Palestinians. We cannot overlook this fact, nor should we forgive it. But voting third party can only worsen the plight of the Palestinians.
Instead, let’s organize with our allies to challenge all the pro-Israel Congressional incumbents we can in the upcoming 2026 primaries. Let’s get started now, and do so publicly, with local committees to recruit viable candidates who can articulate what a balanced policy on Palestine and Israel would look like, and who are conversant on the range of issues Congress deals with.
Where we can field challengers, incumbents will have to choose between adopting new, balanced positions on Palestine and Israel and losing votes in their primaries. Inshallah, some incumbents will lose altogether. With young voters increasingly more thoughtful on this issue, the Democratic leaders can learn to read the writing on the wall.
In politics, there is no substitute for the hard work of organizing. While you are advocating a course of action which on its surface seems counter-productive, groups like Justice Democrats and Emgage, which some of you denigrate, are organizing to counter AIPAC and grow support in Congress to halt offensive military aid to Israel.
At 66 I have voted Green a couple times. The last was in 2000 when I voted for Ralph Nader, only to wonder after 9/11 if I had helped to elect George Bush.
American Muslims face a predicament this election. On the one hand, both the Democratic and Republican parties have failed the Palestinians. Although more Democrats than Republicans have distanced themselves from America’s sponsorship of Israels’ “Mighty Vengeance”, the Biden-Harris administration is running the show.
Many Muslims are urging the community to abandon Harris to send the message that staunch support of Israel is a political liability.
On the other hand, many of the same Muslims understand that the Republican presidential candidate poses a unique threat to Muslims and American democracy. But they reason that having survived one Trump administration, Muslims and America can survive another. That would seem to underestimate the Trump threat.
Imam Tom Facchine has a good grasp of the nature of political power: for any group to wield such power, it must be feared or respected, not liked. And he maintains that Muslims must make sure Harris loses this November, by voting for a third party candidate. Those Muslims who choose instead to vote for Harris to avert a Trump presidency, he sees fit to call “sell outs”.
Sami Hamdi specifically urges Muslims to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and believes that together with their allies Muslims can garner five percent of the vote and thereby qualify for federal and state funding in future elections. This, Hamdi asserts, will break the two party system, and demonstrate that caving to the Israel lobby does not pay.
Hamdi has a powerful delivery which is intended to Wow us, which may obscure the merits of his argument. But he is careful not to resort to name-calling.
Tom Faccine and dozens of fellow Imams have signed a letter calling on American Muslims to reject both Harris and Trump and vote third party instead. Their concluding paragraph contains this sentence: “The Democratic Party’s ongoing refusal to show any intention of reform, even as we witness the greatest catastrophe in modern history, along with the Republican promise to only worsen this evil, leaves us no choice but to take this step.”
And yet, growing numbers of Democrats are calling for the conditioning of American military aid to Israel, and as the sentence states, Trump’s policy promises even worse. (As a sidenote, as awful as it is for the Palestinians, the on-going bloodshed in Sudan is arguably worse.)
It is notable that the Uncommitted Campaign is not abandoning Harris.
I would like to propose another strategy for Muslims and their allies who are intent on changing U.S. policy regarding Israel and Palestine. Let’s start challenging any AIPAC-endowed incumbent legislators we can, with credible candidates in up-coming primaries. It is not too soon to organize and announce our purpose and begin searching for articulate and studied individuals willing to get in the public eye and make the case for a balanced policy on Israel and Palestine, among other foreign and domestic topics candidates should be versed on.
Muslims don’t owe Democrats anything. But politics will remain the art of the possible, and they would be wise to exploit the growing discontent within the party, rather than voting Green this election and handing the Oval Office to an insurrectionist and mentally unfit individual.
(This was originally published on May 13, 2021, during another Israeli war on Gaza.)
I write as violence and tragedy explode yet again between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And it occurred to me the other day that the problems there and the problems at CAIR are similar: there is a pronounced power gap between the parties in each dispute/conflict, and as a result the more powerful is in no hurry to address the grievances of the less powerful.
Indeed, the problem is structural. Power corrupts. Period. (Except in the hands of the Greatest.)
The leader of Israel, with too much military might at his disposal, seems to know no other way but to keep oppressing the Palestinians and taking more of their land.
The CAIR leadership has settled into a style of running the organization in which it is able to champion the cause of justice anywhere but inside CAIR itself. When push comes to shove, it simply imposes its will. It ignores sexual harassment at its affiliates and perpetrates some of its own. Rather than deal honestly with allegations of foul play, it tries to bury the truth by bribing women into signing away their free speech.
The solution in the case of the Palestinians and the Israelis is to cut military and economic aid to Israel, and thereby reduce the power gap. The solution in the case of CAIR is for the leadership to accept the unionization of its employees and a new investigation of allegations of impropriety and mismanagement, conducted by investigators that those who have made the allegations can trust. All non-disclosure agreements should be lifted. This will greatly reduce the power disparity at CAIR.
In response to Leila Fadel’s article published by NPR on April 15, [2021], which was mild, the next day CAIR issued a statement that demonstrates it is in no hurry to deal honestly with the allegations, or that it worries much about the truth. In that statement CAIR claims it supports the right of employees to organize. That is half true. It would be entirely true if it added five words: “except inside its own walls,” as my previous essays should demonstrate.
As used to be a common manner of speech, with that CAIR document and three bucks and some change you can get a coffee at Starbucks.
All the conditions that the leadership of CAIR claims either exist or it aspires to would be greatly advanced if it simply accepted the unionization of its employees. That would help with the standardization of pay, rules for workplace conduct, and a grievance procedure with a neutral arbitrator.
Now, many of you might think my style is unconventional, even unbecoming of a Muslim. Muslims don’t “call people out” like this. Maybe so. I might have a bit of lingering regret that I did not pursue this matter when I first caught wind of it over a year ago. Many of you were alerted as well.
Here I find another analogy with the tragedy in Palestine. CAIR has abundant resources, courtesy of its donors, to fight and delay justice. Meanwhile, the women who are outgunned might resort to unconventional means in their pursuit of justice. The powerful will say that the discontents are not playing by the rules, choosing to ignore the procedures already in place to address their concerns [which Nihad Awad ignores or subverts at will].
Then I come along and I seem to have little regard for any rules. Well, when I hear that some of those discontents were “broken” by CAIR, that at least one victim of a CAIR chapter leader contemplated suicide daily for a period of time, that some have left the Muslim community, or Islam altogether, methinks something must be rotten at CAIR.
My curiosity has led me to one uncomfortable truth about CAIR after another, which will all come out in time. And then yesterday morning I found this text on my phone from a former employee of CAIR:
Through my own experience but more importantly after having spoken to some of the victims of CAIR I am shocked at this organization’s level of injustice, dishonesty and hypocrisy. I genuinely believe this is one of the most abusive Muslim organizations because it’s using its legal prowess funded by zakat money to violate and victimize mainly Muslim women. It’s just such an outrage and is so un-Islamic.
My advice to the leaders of CAIR is the same that my brother, a lawyer, used to give to his clients who were subpoenaed to testify in court: tell the truth as best you know it on day one and never deviate.
Two years ago today, CAIR sent to its community a press release it knew was reckless with the facts, and would likely cause harm to its target, a former senior staff member who was a vocal critic and whom it had unsuccessfully sued for defamation.
Ever since I read internal communications of CAIR from 2016 in which leaders discussed the allegations by a woman who claimed to be a former secret wife of the director of CAIR-Florida, I have known what little regard CAIR-National has for the truth.
In its April 16, 2021 press release one day following Leila Fadel’s groundbreaking expose of allegations against it, published by National Public Radio (NPR), CAIR essentially claimed to have had no former knowledge of any of the sexual exploits of the former Florida director, Hassan Shibly.
Muslim-friendly National Public Radio is not going to publish anything critical of CAIR it does not have high confidence in. Thus, the following paragraph was particularly concerning:
Social media posts by the secret wife made clear that the two had been intimate. And she was privy to sensitive information regarding a CAIR lawsuit. That notwithstanding, CAIR national director Nihad Awad accepted the Florida director’s claim that the woman was a mere “stalker”, and was a very mean woman besides, and had made the whole thing up.
The person who had vigilantly pursued a proper investigation of the woman’s allegations, then the Director of Chapter Development for CAIR, had been excluded from the all-brothers meeting with the accused, and she was told afterwards to apologize to the Florida director and learn to get along with him.
The alleged secret wife was never interviewed by any representative of CAIR.
Faithful readers of this blog site are by now familiar with all of this. But it is important background to a defamation lawsuit CAIR now faces.
The lawsuit filed this past week was brought by the former Director of Chapter Development herself, Lori Saroya, after a concerted campaign by CAIR-National, including its own defamation lawsuit against her, funded by donors, which CAIR was forced to withdraw for lack of evidence.
When CAIR withdrew that lawsuit in January of 2022, it was time for some soul-searching and house-cleaning. But that is not what happened. Instead, on January 20, 2022, CAIR issued a press release intended to smear Lori in the community, with no more regard for truth–or the mental anguish and harm it was certain to cause Lori–than either its lawsuit, or its April 16, 2021 statement of denial of the allegations, or another letter to the CAIR community dated June 23, 2021.
In that January 20, 2022 statement, CAIR claimed its decision to withdraw its lawsuit was a magnanimous one, to put to rest its dispute with Lori. Unfortunately, it went on to smear her, and accused her of the crime of “cyberstalking”. But that crime includes the intention to do serious harm to someone, which is a gross misconstruction of what Lori has been doing since leaving CAIR in 2018.
In emails and on social media, Lori has been blowing the whistle on CAIR’s tolerance of sexual misconduct, gender and religious discrimination, union-thwarting, and financial mismanagement, etc. Her intent has not been to harm anyone, but to bring accountability to a very visible representative of the Muslim community, and a purported civil rights organization besides.
So now the shoe is on the other foot. CAIR will need to defend itself in court, where, to quote CAIR, “the truth matters”. CAIR has undoubtedly caused harm, and not just psychological harm, to Lori Saroya as well as to multiple other women whose dignity and civil rights CAIR has violated.
Insha Allah, this lawsuit will finally bring accountability to CAIR-National, since there is apparently no in-house mechanism, nor any in the broader Muslim community, capable of doing so.
On December 8, 2023, my wife, our dog Daisy, and I headed to California. Checking into a motel in Green River Utah, we turned on the news. There was Nihad Awad, telling an audience how glad he was to see Gazans on October 7 throwing off their shackles and setting foot on land of which they had been dispossessed decades ago.
Fox News had a field day with that. It undoubtedly fed Islamophobia, for the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to seemingly praise the Hamas attack. And since Islamophobia, real and imagined, keeps CAIR in business, I guess Awad’s talk was all in the way of job security.
The White House went to some effort to distance itself from CAIR, the latter being one of many Muslim organizations the Biden administration was working with to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.
CAIR then issued a statement explaining that Awad had been referring to non-Hamas Gazans who had crossed the border after Hamas fighters had burst through. That would have been important information to have included in the first place, were it true.
The best argument against U.S. support for Netanyahu’s’ “mighty vengeance” on the Palestinians is that it can only create more Hamas recruits among an enraged population. As Arab leaders have put it, anyone who thinks Israel can destroy Hamas simply does not know what he is talking about.
But as we make this argument, we need to make very clear that Hamas is one big disgrace to Islam, just as Netanyahu and his partners in crime are a total disgrace to Judaism.
Our job is tough enough without the head of the most visible American Muslim organization seemingly praising Hamas.
As one CAIR chapter official mused some years ago, CAIR has certainly made a name for itself. But is that a good thing for American Muslims?
Many of the purported eye-witness accounts of sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7 sound credible. For all we can know now, they may indeed have been widespread. It is very important that opponents of Israel’s horrific war not dismiss the allegations of sexual violence, or attempt to debunk them. The truth will come out.
Even without allegations of sexual violence, we know Hamas is a dark and polarizing force. By seeking Netanyahu’s “mighty vengeance” and then promising more October sevens, Hamas has demonstrated that it is not fit to govern Palestinians in any peaceful and just agreement with Israel. Neither, obviously, is the current Israeli government fit to govern Israelis in a just agreement with the Palestinians.
It is not necessary to mince any words about Hamas to argue that Israel’s war is precisely the wrong approach, and that America should leverage its military assistance to pressure Israel to reverse course.
Dear President Biden,
Anyone paying attention to the war in Gaza can see that it cannot possibly bring security to Israel. The terrible cost in lives is elevating an otherwise unpopular Hamas in the hearts and minds of too many Palestinians.
Without doubt, this massacre will swell the ranks of those intent on Israel’s destruction.
The only path to security for Israel is to undermine Hamas politically, by reversing course and fully committing to a viable Palestinian state. This will necessitate the relocation of approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Monumental as that task will be, it is the price of security for Israel. With all those settlers relocated, Israel will still retain 78 percent of historical Palestine.
Were it not for its preponderant military forces which the United States has made possible, Israel would have come to its senses long ago and negotiated a two-state solution. Instead, its excessive might has given Israeli governments a sense of entitlement to more Palestinian land (see: https://getrealwithisrael.com/2023/12/02/israel-and-the-curse-of-excessive-power/).
Especially for Prime Minister Netanyahu, a just peace has never been urgent. Instead, Israel has sought to dominate the Palestinians, by policies and laws that essentially amount to apartheid.
It is time for you, President Biden, and all friends of Israel to insist upon an immediate course correction. To that end, the United States must leverage the massive military aid it provides Israel.
If this particular Israeli government is not capable of reversing course, we must insist on it in any case.
The action alert on Israel’s war on Gaza that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has disseminated is clear and to the point regarding an immediate ceasefire and no new military aid for Israel. But one action item or talking point could use some work. Is is this:
“Acknowledge the loss of lives and recognize the humanity on both sides, including Israelis and Palestinians.”
What does Hamas have to do to convince CAIR, and all who seek peace, security, and self-determination for Palestinians, to unequivocally condemn the organization?
No one should doubt that the planners of the October 7 Hamas massacre fully anticipated a disproportionate response by Israel. And when that “mighty vengeance” came, a Hamas official promised more attacks like October 7, probably to the delight of some of those vengeance seekers in Tel Aviv.
Can you get any more depraved than that? In whose interests is Hamas acting?
While condemning the Hamas attack it is nonetheless important to contextualize it, so that people can understand the despair and rage that Palestinians experience after decades of an unjust order being imposed on them, which has been aptly called apartheid. It has included land confiscation and displacement, occupation and its daily burdens and outrages, home demolitions, blockade, excessive military reprisals to Palestinian violence, relentless settlement expansion, settler attacks on Palestinian villagers, mass arrests and military justice which neglects due process, including the routine use of administrative detention.
But if we want people to stick around and listen to all this rather than dismiss us as Hamas apologists, we need to first call Hamas what it is: bad news, period. Hamas is a disgrace to Islam.
Had Hamas attacked Israelis with the single goal of capturing as many adult male hostages as possible, with no more deaths than necessary to accomplish that goal, that would have been different. Instead, large numbers of Israelis suffered horrific deaths. Some parents were murdered in front of their children, and some children murdered in front of their parents. There seem to be plausible evidence and accounts of sexual violence, whether or not it was systematic, as investigations by credible human rights groups will ask.
Israel is guilty of a grave injustice against the Palestinian people, and the ongoing retribution against mostly innocent people in Gaza is barbaric. It disgraces Judaism. The grisly excesses of Hamas do not justify it.
But Muslims are called to respond to evil with something better.
In truth, Hamas and Israel’s fanatical government deserve each other. They each certainly derive any legitimacy they enjoy from the other. And both hate all talk of a two-state solution.
Now, if both the Israeli government and Hamas oppose a two-state solution, there must be something good about it. Some people believe the settlement project is too far gone for there to be any hope of a viable Palestinian state. I cannot know. But if both Hamas and the Israeli government fear the idea, all sensible people should give it a fair look.
Israeli leaders, who don’t want to negotiate anyway, claim there is no legitimate Palestinian leadership to negotiate with, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has promoted Hamas over the Palestinian Authority in order to weaken the latter. Perhaps the most promising Palestinian candidate to negotiate with the Israeli government, Marwan Barghouti, is in an Israeli prison (see: https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-20-barghouti-palestines-nelson-mandela/)
One thing all of us can do is call for the immediate release of Marwan Barghouti, along with the rest of Palestinian prisoners and all of the Israeli hostages, to accompany an immediate ceasefire. Some people may object that whereas all of the hostages are presumably innocent, not all of the Palestinian prisoners are. But Hamas is not going to release the hostages without such a deal, and every day Israel refuses that deal, at least as many innocent Palestinians are slaughtered, and the risk of a larger conflagration grows.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will resist that call, and so we will need to take the matter to the White House and every U.S. senator’s and Congressperson’s office. With Netanyahu and his extremist cohorts, the United States needs to push its weight around.
This could be the perfect project to revive Muslim-Jewish cooperation throughout the country, which cooperation undoubtedly took a big hit in recent weeks.
For more posts on the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy, please go to: getrealwithisrael.com.
Note: What follows I composed some years ago with the input of many members of the Outreach Team at the Islamic Center of Boulder. It was intended as an introduction to Islam for non-Muslims, hence its several non-Islamic references. I post it here today to convey how compelling and vital I found Islam to be, and still do.
O ye people! Adore your Guardian Lord, Who created you and those who came before you, that ye may become righteous, Who made the earth your couch and the heavens your canopy; and sent down rain from the heavens; and brought forth therewith fruits for your sustenance; then set up not rivals unto Allah, when ye know the truth (Qur’an, 2:21-22).
Muslims believe there is one God, the Most Merciful, in Whose hands is all power and goodness. Islam comes from the root s-l-m, which means the peace that comes when one surrenders one’s will to God’s. Allah is God in Arabic.
Early in 7th century Arabia, a region plagued by tribal conflict, economic disparity and other social evils, one Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah began reciting some extraordinary verse. Known for his honesty but not the poet’s gift, what Muhammad recited surpassed Arabia’s finest poetry. Indeed, it claimed to be revelation, from the same God who had sent revelation to all peoples before.
I swear by the stars that slide, stars streaming, stars that sweep along the sky, by the night as it slips away, by the morning when the fragrant air breathes, this is the word of a messenger ennobled…(81:15-19).
This was the God of Abraham, the supreme example of submission. The people who lived by the new revelations were Muslims, those who submit to God’s will. The recitations were compiled and preserved in the Qur’an, and in the memories of millions since who memorized them in their entirety.
When God decided to create humans with free will, His angels were baffled. Why create beings capable of mischief and bloodshed? they asked. God replied: “I know what yeknow not” (2:30). When Adam and Eve sinned, humans were consigned to Earth for a time. “Then learnt Adam from his Lord words of inspiration, and his Lord turned towards him; for He is Oft-Returning, Most Merciful” (2:37).
God provides for all of our needs, urges us to worship Him alone, to be constant in prayer and regular in charity, and patient in adversity. God sees that “For every soul there is a guardian” (86:4).
Muslims, like traditional Christians and Jews, “fear” God. But to truly fear God is to fear nothing else, as in this passage from the Christian song Amazing Grace: “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” To fear God is be ever mindful of life’s purpose and meaning. “Life is real! Life is earnest!” wrote Henry Longfellow. Islam agrees. Frederick Denny writes:
…God is believed to have revealed his will definitively through prophets, signs, and mighty acts….[P]eople cannot merely fatalistically accept what happens; their behavior must be intentional….Responsible living requires making hard choices. History in the biblical and Islamic traditions is an irreversible process in which fateful consequences are decided, either in close covenant relationship with God or, perilously, outside of it (Islam and the Muslim Community).
Muslims do not believe in original sin, or that Eve tempted Adam; he sinned all on his own. We are born with a sound moral foundation, or fitra, which inclines us to believe in God, but we are forgetful and need constant reminding of our purpose. Hence, the five daily prayers. We have free will with the expectation that we will submit to God, but “Let there be no compulsion in religion”(2:256). “We must earnestly search out Allah’s Truth”, writes Abdullah Yusuf Ali, “encouraged by the fact that Allah’s Truth is also, out of His unbounded mercy, searching us out and trying to reach us” (The Meaningof the Holy Qur’an).
With the coming of Islam, for the first time in Arabian society women had real rights: female infanticide and the sexual abuse of slave girls were banned, as was the denial of inheritance to women. No one could be married against her will, and a wife could initiate divorce. Many abuses of women which Westerners associate with Islam, such as “honor” killings, are cultural and have no basis in Islam.
Muhammad’s biggest challenge was tribalism. In place of a multitude of gods, each associated with a specific tribe, the revelations asserted that there is One God, and by implication, one humanity. According to Fazlur Rahman, “Muhammad’s monotheism was… linked up with a humanism and a sense of social and economic justice whose intensity is no less than the intensity of the monotheistic idea, so that the two must be regarded as expressions of the same experience” (Islam, p.12).
All we are and all we possess comes from God, and that includes our individual talents and qualities we typically attribute to our own ingenuity and perseverance. There is no such thing as the self-made individual. Wealth is provided in trust, to be circulated for the benefit of all.
Throughout the Qur’an are vivid images of the day of reckoning:
When the sky is torn, When the stars are scattered, When the seas are poured forth, When the tombs are burst open, Then a soul will know what it has given and what it has held back (82:1-5)
“The Qur’an warns those who reject the day of reckoning and who are entrenched in lives of acquisition and injustice that an accounting awaits them,” writes Michael Sells in Approaching the Qur’an. The warnings collapse a momentous future event into the present, in which we make critical choices. Unbelievers “see the (Day) as a far off (event): But We see it (quite) near” (70: 6-7). Yet, God’s Mercy matches His Power, and He promises mercy to all who are merciful here.
Do you see him who calls the reckoning a lie? He is the one who casts the orphan away, who fails to urge the feeding of one in need. Cursed are those who perform the prayer unmindfully, who make of themselves a big show but hold back the small kindness (107:1-7).
Many Muslims believe gratitude for God’s love suffices to inspire good deeds (righteousness): “And they feed, for the love of Allah, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive” (76:8). The eighth-century Sufi sister Rabi’a denounced anything done out of fear of punishment or desire for rewards. In any case, Muslims believe God loves spontaneous acts of kindness. Once, a woman who was desperate for water finally found a well. After satisfying her thirst, she noticed a very thirsty dog. She went back down into the well and filled a shoe with water for the dog, for which all of her sins were forgiven.
We are to give to those in need, especially what we most value. This idea is captured in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Soon after George Bailey’s father dies, George enters a board meeting of the Bedford Falls Building and Loan, of which his father was president. We see a portrait of his father with these words inscribed: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”
It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces towards East or West; but it is righteousness—to believe in Allah and the Last Day, and the Angels, And the Book, and the Messengers; to spend of your substance despite your love of it, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves; to be steadfast in prayer, and practice regular charity, to fulfill the contracts which ye have made; and to be firm and patient, in pain (or suffering) and adversity, and throughout all periods of panic. Such are the people of truth, the God-fearing (2:177).
One of many things I love about Islam is the concept that the needy actually have a right to a portion of the wealth of others. It is not simply a good thing to share your wealth. Sharing your wealth does not simply better your standing before Allah. Sharing your wealth is an outright obligation.
The number of people with a claim on a portion of others’ wealth has vastly increased in the last few years, which makes it especially shameful of CAIR-National to masquerade as zakat-eligible.
CAIR cannot hide behind bogus determinations by scholars. The primary purpose of zakat is to circulate wealth, with the greatest in need having the greatest claim on that wealth.
In soliciting zakat, as CAIR-National has done throughout this month of Ramadan with sometimes twice-daily pings on my phone, CAIR wants us to believe that all of its expenditures are zakat-eligible, including costly, ill-conceived lawsuits which tried to suppress the civil rights of its own employees and a former employee turned whistleblower.
The Old Guard of CAIR-National knows exactly what wealthy donors want to hear, and much of it is stuff which it would behoove the Old Guard to actually accept and internalize. Living CAIR-National’s professed ideals would greatly enhance its reputation and workplace morale.
At present, however, the leadership of CAIR-National remains mired in corruption and dishonesty, as though it could neutralize the truth of its practices indefinitely. It doesn’t deserve a penny of any Muslim’s zakat.
If this rant has not persuaded you, I hope these very informed and thoughtful essays by Ahmed Shaikh will:
Reform CAIR 