JANUARY 27 Thoughts of an American Muslim

described how people shared their possessions with the victims and gasoline station owners ‘opened their tanks’ so that the gasoline would be free and how wage earners contributed one month’s wages. A Yemeni told her of some of his people’s responsibilities: ‘If someone is sick, or old, or poor, well, we give our food; we get that person clothes; we build for a widow a new house if the old one is falling down.’ The remarkable thing about Dillard’s description is how full of appreciation it is. Most American travellers, returning from Islamic countries, do not give positive reports of Muslims, even of those who have been hospitable to them. They were unable to see any women, these travellers complain, except those who were heavily veiled. They mention how exasperated they became because of the constant references to God and the frequent addition of Insha’ Allah to statements about the future. Even writers sympathetic to Islam often reveal a bias. They describe the tasbih as ‘worry beads,’ without any regard to what dhikr is and how serenity is achieved through the remembrance of Allah. Rumi’s story presupposes a vital aspect of the Islamic ethos, the presence of a moral understanding among all the people. The trust the wife places in the King, the treatment of her husband at the palace gates, the ready acceptance of his meagre offering, the fact that those with the King also took this acceptance in stride, the way the husband was treated in the King’s city. A world, in short, so conspicuous by its absence in this narcissistic country called the United States. There is a moral aridity here which parches the throat and lips and which also parches the soul. It is best summed up in a joke. There was a rich girl in a class who was assigned to write on a poor family. ‘Once upon a time’ she wrote, ‘there was a poor family. The father was poor, the mother was poor, the children were poor, cook was poor, the maid was poor, the butler was poor and the chauffer was poor.’ The United States is that girl, unable to see beyond a very limited set of assumptions it holds dear. After all, its people insist that their country is the epitome of civilization by virtue of its abundance of wealth and weapons (their only criteria for judging whether a country is civilized). There is something drastically lacking and that is a commonly understood sense of either morals or ethics. The United States today is, in short an amoral world. Not immoral, which presupposes the existence of morals, which in turn means that the people are