Alliance of Excellence

Marriage Scabs and the Alliance of Excellence, Part II

By John Taylor; 2006 August 02

Yesterday's thoughts on marriage as scab were prompted by this passage
from the Writings of the Bab. I will include it right away, before my
thoughts take me too far afield, again.

"Say, most people have openly repudiated God and have followed the
rebellious wicked doers. Such people resemble those who have gone before
them, upholding every hostile oppressor. Verily no God is there but God;
His is the kingdom of heaven and earth and He is the Clement, the
All-Knowing." (The Bab, Selections, 167)

This struck me having just re-read Introducing Ethics, a capsule story
of thought about what is right and wrong. Ethics is just what the Bab
says, most throughout history have rebelled, repudiated God and
implicated themselves in some kind of tyranny or other. The common
rejection of mankind meant that ethical theory was hardly a burning
issue in most people's minds, but even among thinkers about ethics (not
necessarily the same thing as ethical thinkers, of course) a repeating
cycle is set up in every age.

No sooner do we start to think we know something about what being
ethical means than along comes a cynic, usually an atheist, often also a
homosexual (homosexuality among animals and humans acts as a sort of
rebellion or counterpoise to sexual reproduction), and this fellow
easily demolishes everything. He proves us wrong about what we thought
we knew. You get at various times your Diogenes, your Hume, Freud,
Russell, Derrida, and on and on. Because their criticism seems so
devastating they gain a large following and huge prestige.

In this respect both leader and followers always "resemble those who
went before them...” they forget the big NOTWITHSTANDING at the heart of
belief. They forget Socrates and Socratic Ignorance; they forget the
Book of Ecclesiastes. I recently stumbled across Ecclesiastes in a
keyword search for something or other and I was hooked. What a wonderful
sustained poem recounting over and over the futility of human existence!
I just love it. I could not help it, I read it from cover to cover there
and then. When I get my website going the first thing I am going to do
is make up a little video where I read the text of Ecclesiastes and
accompany it with a photo montage visual accompaniment of local
graveyards, gravestones and funeral processions. Dreary to a
non-believer, to a believer, edifying.

At the same time I am reading Introducing Islam, which includes a large
number of Hadith that I do not recall seeing before. What got me onto
marriage was the following all-round remarkable statement about charity.

"To bring about a just reconciliation between two contestants is
charity, helping a person mount his animal or to load his baggage onto
it is charity, a good word is charity, to remove obstacles in the street
is charity, smiling upon your brother is charity ... sexual relations
with your spouses is charity." (Ziauddin Sardar, Introducing Islam, Icon
Books, Royston, 2004, p. 10)

How the West would have benefited over the centuries had the authority
of this pronouncement been recognized! Having sex with your spouse is
counted by God as a form of charity? What a great way to douse the
flames of sexual passion! Really, if sex had had this kind of divine
sanction in the purview of Westerners I very much doubt that there would
have that tedious swing back and forth, a generation of Puritanism
followed by a generation of sexual "revolution," then back to
"repression" and then liberation again. If we had started off by
understanding legitimate sex to be a form of spontaneous giving, I do
not think that marriage would have become the scab that it did. We would
not have used the shorthand of coverture, legally conflating two people
into one, instead of into more than the sum of the two. We would have
made it into a living, developing institution rather than a dead, filthy
scab.

And getting back to charity, compare the common ambivalence and out and
out dislike of charity that is so common in the West, "I do not want no
charity!," and our assumption that charity must be institutionalized,
planned, laid out, signed, sealed and delivered by an official
registered charity, even the common idea that charity is something you
must do with your wallet. If we had thought of a smile upon a stranger
as a form of charity, corporations like McDonalds could never have
co-opted it with their "smiles are free" and orders to their minions to
wish upon all a big "have a nice day." Compare the hadith quoted above
with Jane Jacobs' great discovery about what makes for life and death in
street life,

"In speaking about city sidewalk safety, I mentioned how necessary it is
that there should be, in the brains behind the eyes on the street, an
almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips
are down -- when a citizen has to choose, for instance, whether he will
take responsibility, or abdicate it, in combating barbarism or
protecting strangers. There is a short word for this assumption of
support: trust. The trust of a city street is formed over time from
many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly
utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such
casual, public contact at a local level -- most of it fortuitous, most
of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned
and not thrust upon him by anyone -- is a feeling for the public
identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in
time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a
disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.
And above all, it implies no private commitments." (Jane Jacobs, The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books, New York, 1961,
p. 56)

Jacobs is talking about an environment where little acts of charity,
so-called guerrilla or mindless acts of kindness are the rule rather
than the exception, and it does happen where a community is structured
so as to encourage enough contact -- the kind of place, she notes, that
city planners call a "slum" and slate for destruction. But this does not
come about on its own without a thousand smiles and bits of advice and
shared laughs and other spontaneous acts of charity like those that the
Prophet mentions. Many diverse, positive contacts, combined with
goodwill and ethical understanding, all combine to get people to trust,
to do naturally what the Qu'ran inculcates,

"They believe in God, and in the last day, and bid what is reasonable,
and forbid what is wrong, and vie in charity; these are among the
righteous." (Qur'an 3, E.H. Palmer tr.)

In an atmosphere of trust and cooperation you can vie with your
neighbors in charity, just as our corporate brainwashers already vie
with one another in presenting an image of greed as the ideal, just as
they encourage us to vie with our neighbors in being acquisitive
consumers. Long ago we could have protected ourselves with Muhammad's
simple, penetrating protective warnings, like:

"Little but sufficient is better than the abundant and the alluring."
(Hadith)

Crime and lawlessness, the bane of modern street life, as well as terror
in international relations, are the effect of a general decline in trust
between neighbors. We gradually learn through bitter rebuffs not to be
our brothers' keepers, to leave everything to the professionals, to flee
to credentialism, to call the cops or take it to court, or even just to
ignore it and go on a shopping spree to make yourself feel better.
Consider, in the light of this, the following story about Muhammad as a
teen, long before he was raised to the station of Prophet. This
"Introducing Islam" calls "The Pledge."

"One day, a trader from Yemen was cheated of his goods by a group of
Makkans. When the trader asked for help, no one came to his support. So
he wrote a satirical poem and recited it aloud for all to hear. When
Zubair, one of Muhammad's uncles, heard the poem he felt great remorse.
He called a meeting of city's elders and established an order of
chivalry with the declared aim of protecting the oppressed of the city,
local inhabitants or foreign visitors. Young Muhammad became an
enthusiastic member of this organization which was called Hilf al-fudul.
Later he would say: 'I am not prepared to give up the privilege (of
being a member) even against a herd of camels; if somebody should appeal
to me even today, by virtue of that pledge, I shall hurry to his help.'"
(Introducing Islam, 8)

The pledge. Note the power of poetry. For Arabs then and now, poets have
the prestige and influence of rock stars. And the pledge they (some
sources say it was Muhammad Himself who suggested the organization be
founded, others say it was all done by His uncle) started going in the
city streets of Mecca is startlingly close to the vow of a knight to
uphold honor and perform charity to the weak! Is this the origin of the
chivalric code that got Europe out of the Dark Ages into the
Renaissance, and eventually to world hegemony? Right away I furiously
Googled "Hilf al-Fudul" (Alliance of Excellence) but found very little
about this pre-Islamic organization. There is apparently a good article
about it in an Urdu source, but I do not read Urdu. I hit a dead end,
but I will bounce back.

Meantime, consider the idea of competition itself. It is a natural human
impulse. It can be used ethically, or for our general destruction. We
can compete in charity, or we can compete economically or, worst of all,
in war. Greed is inherent not only to commercialism but also to the
militarized mind set. Consider what Aristotle said,

"...in one point of view, the art of war is a natural art of
acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which
we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though
intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a
kind is naturally just." (Aristotle, Politics)

We can therefore say that a peace economy is the opposite of
acquisitive, it is charity oriented. Its members vie with each other not
just to better one another but mostly because of the natural limits on
our span of life,

"Hasten to do good before you are overtaken by perplexing adversity,
corrupting prosperity, disabling disease, babbling dotage and sudden death."

We vie with one another in order to emulate the peaceful nature of God,
"God is gentle and loves gentleness in all things." (Hadith) Such is a
genteel nature, one whose gentlemanliness upholds chivalric ideals of
good acts for goodness sake, be they small and big, planned or
spontaneous. This is the Order of Excellence, to do whatever we can to
promote goodwill among neighbors and love among spouses and family
members. And we vie with one another in that because charity is a way to
make our lives matter beyond the here and now; charity is our arrow to
infinity.

"When a person dies, his deeds come to an end, except in respect of
three matters which he leaves behind: a continuing charity, knowledge
from which benefit could be derived and righteous offspring who pray for
him." (28)