Tayyibah Taylor, editor-in-chief of Azizah Magazine in Atlanta, Ga., believes that there is enough work for everyone. People need to pick a project and expend energy in getting it done rather than arguing about which cause is greater. Yes, people do have a natural inclination to be loyal to an ethnicity. But as Muslims, the cause of human beings in need should supersede this partiality. “As believers, we should strive to compete in good deeds, not strive to compete in whose cause is better, whose pain is greater or whose situation is more dire,” Taylor says. We should not be quick to judge, she says, who is a better activist based on event attendance. They could be doing more work behind the scenes, like writing letters, making phone calls or getting up in the middle of the night to make sincere dua. That might help a cause more than donning your finest clothes and sitting at a fundraiser. “Cause ownership should be principle based and must go beyond the lines of religious, cultural and ethnic divides,” says Dr. Tariq Cheema, CEO of World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists, based in Chicago
Competing charities? You bet! If you feel, that you get way too many Facebook invites for causes or perforated brochures to donate, you are not alone. In 2011, total giving to charitable organizations was $298.42 billion. About 73 percent of that giving came from individuals. Corporate giving accounted for just 5 percent. About 32 percent of all donations, or $95.88 billion, went to religious organizations. The next largest sector was education with $38.87 billion, then health charities, public benefit charities, arts, culture, humanities charities, international charities, human services, environmental and animal charities in this order. Source: Charity Navigator and Giving USA 2012, The Annual Report on Philanthropy.
and Doha. “Otherwise it is supporting a cause in pure self-interest and with utter shortsightedness.” He feels that Muslims have in some ways become isolated from the mainstream as they are narrow in their cause spectrum, and further divisions in the name of country or ethnicity don’t help.
Young Blood The youth are a prime example of how activism can cross ethnic boundaries. Dana Al-Farhan, a junior at the University
of Alabama at Birmingham, believes that all struggles are connected. Even though she is of Iraqi descent, she has organized events for Syria and Palestine. She is inspired by the hadith: “The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever” (Bukhari, Muslim). Al-Farhan feels that, although it shouldn’t be so, it is harder to mobilize Muslims when it’s a non-Arab or a non-Muslim cause.
Dana Al Farhan Islamic Horizons January/February 2013
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