Voice of British Muslim Women

Iffat Mirza Rashid, Bentley

I’m sure we’ve all seen them – those videos that every now and then might pop on our social media, or might be sent to us by friends and families – the ones of one animal taking care of a baby animal of a different species. A cute glimpse into a cat taking care of a puppy or a lioness playing with a baby antelope etc. Videos like that inspire a certain …well, I suppose ‘humanity’ might not be quite the right word since I’m not talking about humans, but it shows us that compassion really is everywhere and all around us. In fact, compassion might just even be synonymous with life.

To live necessarily means to be part of a community – whether that is a local, national, or even international community. And in doing so, we come to the idea of social contracts, codes of morality, all in all, what it means to be a person who is aware of the fact that their actions can have implications on others too. Of course, this comes with a great responsibility but it can even just be a matter of offering others in the room the last cookie before taking it for yourself. There is an understanding that when I am around others, I should behave accordingly, as minute or insignificant as a particular action might seem.

But if it were only about giving up the last cookie, I suppose it would all be a lot easier, but living in the globalised world that we do today, it’s harder to measure up our level of responsibility against much larger entities of power. How do we negotiate our sense of duty and responsibility against something that neither knows nor cares about our existence? When there’s so much cruelty and injustice taking place before our very eyes, can this sense of intrinsic compassion that animals in the wild display come anywhere close to resolving the issue?

The answer, I think, is that it doesn’t matter of whether it can or cannot, it’s that we have to believe that it can. Like the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus suggested we must imagine Sisyphus happy, we must believe that basic compassion is the antidote to such evils in the world.

Camus uses the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a king condemned by the Greek gods to roll a boulder up a mountain only for it to roll back down for eternity, as a metaphor for the human condition. Life, he argues, is similarly repetitive and seemingly without ultimate purpose, yet humans persist in seeking meaning. Camus argues that Sisyphus’ situation is absurd, but rather than succumbing to despair, he posits that one must accept the absurd and live in defiance of it. The key to this defiance is in recognising the lack of inherent meaning but choosing to embrace life regardless. 

By imagining Sisyphus happy, Camus suggests that true freedom lies in accepting one’s fate without illusion and finding joy in the struggle itself. Happiness, then, is not about escaping absurdity but about embracing it with full awareness. Sisyphus, in choosing to continue pushing the rock, transforms his punishment into a form of personal victory. I believe, in the same way we must imagine Sisyphus happy, we must believe in good, against all odds.

5th April is the United Nation’s designated International Day of Conscience. Inspired by the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,’ This day is designed to promote the belief that by paying heed to our conscience and responsibility to mankind, we can work towards peace and justice, the paving stoned towards a harmonious and prosperous society. 

Now whilst we can debate the effectiveness of such commemoration days, or even institutions such as the United Nations, but the reality is that we need to ensure that our existence does not become defined by the absurdity of the cruelties around us. In allowing ourselves to become so engulfed in our despair at the cruelties around us, not only do we permit further cruelties to become normalised, but we compromise our own conscience and like Sisyphys, find ourselves in eternal misery. Similarly, our conscience allows us to live in defiance of the casualty of cruelty, and so it is of utmost importance that even if it is only an internal condemnation of evil within our hearts and minds, we must allow our conscience to speak the truth. Thinking of it as such, makes the words of the Holy Prophet (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) ever important:

“Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart.” [Muslim]

Such wisdom emphasises the importance of keeping our conscience in check. The reality is that once evil becomes normal or casual, there comes a point where not only do we keep quiet, but we accept it as some sort of fact of life, whereas the reality is that it never needs to be accepted. The importance of staying steadfast on the truth of our conscience allows us to resist the normalisation of evil, and for as long as we can do that, we can believe in a future without evil.