My (earnest, irate) thoughts

The Qur’an, like the Bible, has a lot to say about money, and the rich. Jesus’ famous answer to a rich man’s love for his money (”It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven”) also finds complementary phrases in prophet Muhammad’s hadiths (”Two wolves among sheep do less damage than greed and wealth do to a man’s religion”).

An Islamic attitude (and I believe, a Christian one) toward money falls smack between hedonism and asceticism. In fact, the Muslim view of money is simple:

1) Give generously, because everything you have is from God.
2) Never waste anything, because everything you have is from God.
3) Give generously, but not so much that you require alms yourself.
4) If one year passes and you continue to own wealth in any form — a house, a horse, a car, a piece of land, a gold bracelet, you *must* pay a 2.5 percent tax on that wealth, called zakat, to the poor. This money is viewed as already being owned by the poor; keeping it is equal to thievery.
5) Feeding the hungry is equivalent to freeing someone from slavery, an act that prompts God to forgive your sins.

Boiled down, the Muslim view of money is: “what’s mine is God’s, what’s yours is yours.” It’s a far cry from the cut-throat capitalism and nationalism sweeping through the world, and the searing hatred of brown-skinned poverty, all of which makes me throw up a little in my mouth.

What gets under my skin is when people try to wed religion with things that are totally antithetical to religion, like greed. Prosperity theology is a newish trend, an American attempt to rationalize wealth as a sign of God’s favor (which reminds me of other stupid notions like ‘manifest destiny’). This September 2006 article in Time Magazine — Does God want you to be rich? A Holy Controversy — talks all about it.

Though I think predestination is a logical fallacy — it would maintain that God, too, is inside of and is limited by the human perception of time, and from within that limitation, can see the future — I do believe in fate. Muslim tradition says that 40 days after conception, as God sends angels to breathe into humans their ruh, or spirit, He sends other angels to write down in the Book of Life a few facts about this particular human: one is the length of her life, another is the amount of money she will make.

Along with fate, I believe in free will. What’s interesting here is that we are still completely responsible for our wealth and how we earned it. Here it is: one would have earned the same amount, down to the penny, even if one had not resorted to thievery or trickery. If one is ‘fated’ to be poor, stealing won’t change that. If one is ‘fated’ to be rich, stealing isn’t necessary. There is a sense of inevitability that is rather liberating.

I read once that stealing is the most reprehensible of all sins, and that all sins, in a way, are a form of theft — if you lie, you have stolen someone’s right to the truth; if you commit adultery, you have stolen someone’s right to intimacy with his or her spouse. (I think that was in The Kite Runner, too. I love that book.)

Anyway, there is this sense that all things, including money, come from God and not through any power of our own. Which sort of falsifies this silly American notion that poor people are subhuman, and rich people are blessed. Wealth is a mixed blessing, at the least.

But wealth itself is not inherently evil in Islam (or, I believe, in Christianity). It is the love of money that is the root of all sorts of sins. Riches are actually a test, and a rather hard one to pass. Materialism and spiritualism are like two sides of a coin — too much stuff can distract us from our true mission, to connect with the Divine; a lack of possessions can help us refocus. But the comfortable man who overcomes the spiritual challenge and keeps his thoughts centered on Allah — who showers gifts on the poor and sets up institutions like schools or mosques — that rich man can experience prosperity in both worlds.

I love this story: Prophet Abraham used to walk a mile or more every day, searching for a poor person to feed. One day he happened upon some kind of shaman, who asked for alms. Because he was not a believer, Abraham said firmly, ‘I won’t feed you unless you change your religion.’ So the shaman left, downcast. And God spoke to Abraham, saying, ‘Who are you to turn him away? He is an unbeliever, but I have been feeding him for 70 years. What do you think will happen if you feed him?’ Properly chastized, Abraham ran back and invited to his home the man, (who later embraced monotheism).

This blog entry was inspired (as are others) by Umm Yasmin’s Dervish, a wonderful blog that I can’t get enough of.