Plenary,

Meeting date: Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Official Report 373KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business, as always, is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Haroon Ahmed from the Scottish Inter Faith Council.

In this day and age, there are too many things—or too few; I forget which—worth talking about, so you will understand why it took me a while to decide what I would talk about. I finally decided to be a wee bit clichéd and to talk to you about something that you all hear a great deal about every day—charity. I do not want to talk about volunteering or writing cheques, because everyone else does that, nor do I want to talk about ending world hunger or fighting the poverty that exists in certain areas of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in pretty much every city in the world. I want to talk about what charity means to me as a Muslim.

There is a Hadith, which is a saying of the Prophet of Islam, Prophet Muhammad—peace be upon him—that goes:

"Each person's every joint must perform a charity every day the sun comes up".

Let us think about that, but just for a second. There are 206 bones in the human body, so there are a lot of joints between them. That makes a lot of charities that I, for one, feel obligated to perform on a daily basis. It sounds like an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task, but it is not, because Prophet Muhammad was not talking just about the big things. He was talking about anything that makes life a little bit easier for someone else.

He went on to give a few examples of what he classified as "a charity". He said:

"to act justly between two people is a charity; to help a man with his mount, lifting him onto it or hoisting up his belongings onto it, is a charity; a good word is a charity; every step you take towards prayer is a charity; and removing a harmful thing from the road is a charity."

He was talking about little things—tiny actions that take no more than a few seconds or minutes of our time and which really do make life better for other people.

There is one other act of charity that I want to mention. On a separate occasion, the Prophet classified smiling as an act of charity. The Hadith in which he talked about that has been analysed by many people over the years. In the analysis of Justice Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, one of our contemporary scholars of Islam, the Prophet meant more than just giving a smile. He was saying that if you stop and talk to someone, even just for a minute, and they feel a little bit better when they come out of that conversation and feel as if their load has been lightened, you will have conducted a truly great charity.