How Do You Explain An Insurrection?
Jumuah Mubarak. The adults in the room have royally bleeped everything up.
A year ago today, my wife, the kids, and I turned on the TV and watched in horror.
You probably did, too. What might be the greatest symbol of our country’s aspiration to representative and accountable government was under attack by an insurrectionist mob, animated by lies, desperate for mayhem, calling for blood, its arms wide open to authoritarianism. In effect, an unfolding, disordered coup.
But how do you explain this to three kids already dealing with an ongoing plague—this was, on top of everything, before any vaccines were available—and living in a town most of whose voters pulled the lever for Trump (the one, you know, cheering sedition), and oh yeah, maybe our planet is dying?
How do you face kids and tell them you know better when undeniably the adults around them have royally bleeped almost everything up?
I mean, America had problems, but America has never had this particular convergence of epic and systemic problems. The kids aren’t just watching the TV, though, like you are, they’re also or maybe mostly watching you, looking for an explanation, reassurance, guidance, context, all of these reasonable requests, and yet I’m not sure how any parent can explain something that is devolving in real time.
We don’t know what it means because we actually don’t know how it’ll end. But we can’t just say that (or maybe we can, but we can’t just leave it there, like that, hanging ominously, absent any resolution or direction.) We are called to do so much more.
There’s definitely a lot to be said for explanations, for background, for history, and for civics in the abstract—but, as I’m learning, embodying does more than commenting, or rather, complements it and renders it substantive.
Yesterday, on the anniversary of that awful occasion, I offered a Muslim invocation at an event held in front of Cincinnati’s City Hall to honor the officers who risked so much, and indeed everything they had, to protect our nation.
One of the reasons I did so was simple. An awful, overwhelming guilt. This is the country we are bequeathing our descendants? I don’t know how America unfolds, I don’t know what happens in ‘22, let alone ‘24, but I do want F, Z, and R to know that their parents did not sit passively by. That we tried something. That we made an effort.
And I want them to know, and I need them to know, that that’s fundamentally what it means to be a Muslim in the world but not of the world. It’s a subtle distinction, but so much depends on it and so much grows out of it. Just a week ago, we had a brief, impromptu halaqa after maghrib prayers on this very topic.
On what it really means to behave like a Muslim.
This came up. This idea of striving. That that’s what Islam is all about: The result, ultimately, is never in our hands. But we are judged, as the hadith tells us, not by the action, but by the intention—did we want to do good? Maybe the good we sought to bring about did not come about. But God rewards us for the effort. The struggle.
Y’all know what I mean.
Our main paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, put together an excellent write-up about this memorial, which attracted dozens of attendees despite taking place on a frigid Thursday afternoon, temperatures decidedly in the teens (for you international types, that means it was easily -6 or -7 degrees C). And snow was starting to fall.
Still, they came out. We came out. Below this image, which the Enquirer captured of the afternoon service, you’ll find the full text of my du‘a, my supplication, the under-two-minutes I had to say something of substance that linked my faith to this moment in time, to offer a meaningful insight of a kind. I pray I was successful.
I pray God accepts the effort. I pray that the next time we sit down together and talk, probably and preferably after a maghrib, I have the courage to gently ask them what they believe is worth sacrificing time for, making an effort for. And I pray that their answers and the subsequent conversation helps me decide what to make time for.
Because, you see, I can and have to give them some kinds of answers and explanations. But teach a man to fish, after all: Are they able, willing, and eager to ask the hard questions? Like, how did America come to this? What was my part in making this happen? What did I do wrong—and what, if anything, did I do right?
And what do we do now?
In the name of God, Loving to all and Merciful to each
My religion teaches that all the world’s great faiths come from the same source, that time and again, God chose Messengers from every people, principled and loving persons to whom the Divine vouchsafed the same eternal Truth
Those Messengers range from Adam to Muhammad, and included Zoroaster, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus, peace be upon them all; many later Muslims came to believe that the sages of ancient Hindu and Buddhist tradition were Messengers of the same faith as well
And what made that universality possible, except that every person has the same innate disposition towards justice, charity, and decency? Of course, it is ultimately up to each of us whether we cultivate or suppress that disposition, whether we lean towards the light or away from it
Today, we honor those who by risking life and limb revealed their own character, who gave so much, and even everything, to a sacred symbol not only of our country but of the noble ideals we aspire to, that have enabled us to weld out of all peoples a nation unlike most others
A nation that believes we are all born equal and can all aspire to greatness
Those are not beliefs that the world or even our nation has been consistently true to; it is, thus, not just the value of these beliefs, but their rareness that should cause us to consider even more compelling the service of those who dedicate their lives to protecting our national experiment
Today, we call on the Almighty to honor and bless those who sacrifice so much, who make possible our democracy, and to empower us with a similar strength, by which to speak out for what is right, and by so doing, leave our country stronger than we found it. Ameen.