KEEPING AN EYE ON THE STORM: DOING DEMOCRACY

Katrina invokes needs that range from the immediate to the long term and that implicate Americans in general and Muslim Americans in particular. On a general plane, each American can urge the government to address America’s problems at the policy level. On a particular plane, Muslim Americans should urge each other and fellow Americans to address America’s problems at the community level.

As for policy proposals, avoiding Katrina-like situations demands a paradigm shift. For times of crisis, our government should transform its ineffective, debilitating, and costly band-aid approach into a clear-eyed, forward-looking, humanitarian, ends-based, democratic approach that recognizes problems and addresses them before they turn into disaster. In essence, they must be proactive.

Such an approach is clear-eyed and forward-looking insofar as it constantly monitors the welfare of its citizens. This will enable the government to take comparatively small and inexpensive steps now to avert expensive disaster later.

It is humanitarian because it seeks to ensure that every human enjoys a decent standard of living along with a measure of safety and security. If we truly believe in the equal value to human life, and each individual’s right to pursue liberty and happiness, we must work to reasonably ensure that those words ring true not only for those who already have access to Washington’s package of rights and entitlements, but also for the invisibles.

The approach is ends-based inasmuch as it measures success in terms of success itself, not in the empty promise of a hypothetical opportunity for success.

Finally, it is democratic because full civic participation and a sense of community can only occur once people’s basic needs are met, once they receive adequate schooling, once they live in safe communities, and once they know that they have a say in their own governance. In any community, the problem of one member is the problem of every member. Focusing on the most vulnerable members is like paying attention to the canary in the mine; its faltering lungs signal to the miners that the air has been contaminated. The community would do well to address its problems rather than live with pollutants that will take their inevitable toll on everyone.7

Advocating a paradigm shift cannot itself create one. The government is a slow-moving machine for which policy changes are difficult, and even when they occur, can take decades to transform reality. But to acknowledge the difficulty of demanding democracy is not to minimize the need for doing so. In fact, it means that much more responsibility falls on average citizens to keep Katrina’s invisibles visible to the policy world and each other. After all, “Democracy is never a thing done … [but] always something that a nation must be doing.”8 It takes conscious citizens to do democracy.

WHIRLWIND OF COMPASSION: COMMUNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

Here is where the Muslim American contribution comes in. Ramadan has passed (the month of fasting that began the first week of October, 2005), but hopefully, it leaves behind its imprint on the Muslim conscience. Ramadan is the annual reminder to Muslims to be conscious of the invisible. God says in the Qur’an that he prescribed fasting on Muslims so that they might learn consciousness (2:183). Consciousness of what? The immediate suggestion is God of the unseen world, which automatically devolves to a consciousness of the things with which God is concerned in the world in which we live, including the unseen invisibles. Like that consciousness about which W.E.B. Dubois speaks with respect to Blackamericans, this is a double-consciousness. It stems from the “twoness” of the spiritual and corporal aspects of the human, which are virtually inseparable.9

For Muslims, the first aspect partially takes the form of certain beliefs—beliefs in a compassionate God who wants justice, in an afterlife in which each will be evaluated according to their deeds and in prophets who deliver that message. The second aspect entails a heavy community component that is always concerned with justice, not for Muslims, but for human beings. The Qur’an emphasizes this imperative for justice over and over again. It calls upon Muslims to stand up for justice, in its deepest sense, even if it be against themselves and community members (4:135, 6:152).

It also promotes a form of distributive justice by repeatedly calling for Muslims to make contributions that ensure the welfare of their neighbors. For example, the Qur’an always pairs prayer (a focus on the divine and spiritual for personal welfare) with charity (a focus on the corporeal and communal for public welfare). Particularly during Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to be more generous. The days of fasting serve as a reminder of those who may behungry all the time. As such, Ramadan functions as an annual reminder to be conscious of the invisibles, and to do something to improve their situation.

The Qur’an says:

It is not righteousness that you turn your faces to the East

or the West, but righteousness [describes] one who believes

in God and the Last Day, the Angels, the Book, and the

Prophets; [who] gives of their resources, for the love of God,

to relatives, orphans, the indigent, travelers, to those who

request it and to those in bondage; [who] stand in prayer and

give in charity; those who fulfill their promises when they

enter into agreements and those who are patient in adversity

and disaster and in the midst of tribulation. Those are the

people of truth, and those are the ones who are conscious