The prophet Muhammad’s compassion

Every recitation of the Quran begins with an invocation to the mercy and compassion of god (bism allah alrahman alrahim [ بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم]), and the Quran is really nothing but a cry for compassion.

The bedrock message of the Quran is that it’s wrong to build up a private fortune, but good to share your wealth equally and to look out for the vulnerable and the poor people in society. That is the chief duty of every single Muslim. And the prophet ﷺ once said: “not one of you can be a believer, unless he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself”.

This is what is often called the Golden rule. It’s been enunciated in every single one of the major world traditions. Sometimes it comes in this form: “Never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself”, or in the positive form: “Always treat all others as you would wish to be treated”. And all the faiths have said that this is the test of true spirituality, and it is this that brings us into the presence of what we call god. So, compassion is key to the religious life, and the religions all insist that we cannot confine our compassion to our own group, to our own congenial group of people. “We must have a Yan I”, said one of the Chinese Sages, concern for everybody.

“O peoplelo, says the Quran, “we have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may get to know one another“”, not so that we may exploit or terrorize, or colonize, or convert even, but so that we may get to know one another. And this is the key task of our time, to build by means of compassion and respect a global community where all peoples, whoever they are treated with absolute equity and respect. And it seems to me that unless now we implement the golden rule globally, we are not going to have a viable world.

This is the task of our generation, and we all have a duty to look into our traditions to find that compassionate core and make it speak to the world. We all have to become avatars of compassion as the prophet ﷺ was. We have to be messengers of compassion in our time, and we have to do this globally even to people with whom we feel enmity, who dislike us, or who are at war with us.

I think if we just look to the prophet ﷺ, we have a mode of how we should behave. Always in mecca, when his people were being persecuted and abused, he would keep his calm. He wouldn’t allow himself to respond aggressively, even when he was physically abused and threatened in any way. This is a time of fitnah for Muslims. We often talk of the first and second fitnah, after the prophet’s death when there were civil wars and it was a time of great trial and trouble, and this is similarly a time of trial and trouble.

But Muslims in the past have always used these periods of difficulty as a spiritual opportunity. They have racked their brains and thought creatively how to bring the compassionate and the deep spiritual lessons of the Quran to a violent and trouble world. And that’s our duty in this world to make the compassionate voice of Islam speak loud and clear and make it a dynamic force in our time. If we all every single one of us did that, we could drown the voices of extremism and do our best to work for a peaceful, just and sustainable world.

Karen Armostrong