The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Overcoming Palestine's Struggles Through Faith

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

As Palestinian Muslims contend with the horrors of ongoing war and violence overseas, friends and family here at home struggle to maintain their sense of hope and peace. Aishah Ashraf talks with Shaykh Hosam Helal and Dalia Hashim of ISNA Canada to learn how a bustling Mississauga Mosque supports their community at a time of utter devastation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Today we're joined by members of the mosque to discuss the profound meaning of community during a time where a global Muslim family is grappling with the harsh realities of war and conflict. We're here in this beautiful space here at ISNA, so why don't you tell us first about what ISNA is exactly? ISNA stands for the Islamic Society of North America. This is our headquarters. So you're getting to kind of see where our main space is. The main thing is trying to serve every facet of the Muslim community,

whether it's the need for food banks, or the need for counseling, or just the need for people to kind of come together as a community we kind of try to serve all of those different needs so it really is an all-in-one that's that's the hope that's the hope how are you i'm good thank you so much for joining me here today you play a big role here as well as the sheikh so for those who might not be familiar with what a sheikh is, can you run us through that? A sheikh is a community servant, an advocate, a friend, a teacher, an educator, a helper, and occupies many roles.

So we do counseling sometimes, we do chaplaincy, we do hospital visits. We're there when people are getting married, we're there when people are getting divorced, trying not to get them divorced. And we're there, of course, to lead prayers, the five-day prayers, the sermons. So an imam is somebody that keeps the glue to the community, that brings people together and helps them stay together. So you're really wearing all these different hats. It's a blessing.

It's humbling and it's also a lot of pressure. People look up to you, so you have to hold yourself to a high standard. You have to always be available in the best way possible. So at any moment you can expect a need, you do have to step up. So it's very humbling but also very, very rewarding as well. Palestine is on all of our minds when we come together as a community, in the prayers that we make, where people want to donate and where they want to support. It's on all of our minds. And I think this year more than any year, that's why you see the community coming together with such strength and such intensity, because we all feel like we're hurting. And when you're hurt, you want to hurt together. And you want to come together and be like, all feel like we're hurting and when you're hurt you want to hurt together and you want to come together and be like I feel what you're feeling

we're going through the same thing what can we do to make it better and I think you know you don't need to have family in Palestine you don't need to have someone that you know in Palestine to really feel the hurt there's a lot of people in this community who do actually have family in Palestine and they want to feel that everyone is with them, that they know what they're going through, that they feel for what they're going through and that, you know, the community hasn't forgotten them, even though we're miles and miles away. You know, a lot of us were thinking about our community across the globe in Palestine and what they're going through. For those who might not know, what is happening in Palestine?

What are these people going through? It's unbelievable. It's horrific because you have people who are being uplifted, uprooted from their homes. The physicians that we know that are on the ground describe the horror. The people that we have there as family, they tell us on a day-to-day basis

that it's just absolute horror, absolute violence. My Jewish friends that I believe to be holding on to a genuine understanding of Judaism, we have conversations all the time, and we've come to a point, a healthy point, where we understand it's not about the faith, it's about the way that people misuse and misrepresent and sometimes project their own political ambitions and desires onto their religious ideology and we know Muslims have done that the you know in in our own history and our own tradition and we should learn from these we should learn from these mishaps and misunderstandings I think it's great that you said you're sitting down and having conversations with people like

your Jewish friends and because I think the importance is to realize that this is a humanitarian issue at the end of the day, and we're all on the same team. And, you know, we see that even though this is happening across the globe, it's making such an impact on these little communities everywhere else. I think each and every one of us feels a little bit of guilt. You know, I can tell you stories and stories upon stories. And it's just very sad to hear these stories. And it's very close to home because, you know, my wife herself, she's, you know, Palestinian. Her family are from Gaza. So she's half Palestinian, half Egyptian.

So when we're sitting and having those dinner conversations, we're hearing, you know, about this family that has faced this difficult horror, this family who's lost 20 people in one day. Imagine burying 20 of your family members in one day. A hospital who has doctors, subhanAllah, who are being prevented from doing the work that they should. It's very heavy and it weighs down on us. So you can call it survivor's guilt. You can call it whatever you want. But at the end of the day, it's just difficult to smile. It's difficult to enjoy even the basic moments.

Like SubhanAllah, I remember when my three-year-old daughter, she was hearing me and my wife talk about this. And then she says to me, Baba, if they don't have food, if they're struggling just just send them uber eats just let's order some food for them but of course there are many uh challenges and difficulties in the way and sometimes when i see my children when i am having that personal moment with them and i see their innocence and I see their happiness running around. There are moments where tears come to my eyes

and I think there are people out there, fathers and mothers, who have been deprived of that, who've had to bury all of their children, right? We hear stories of people saying, families, like a mom and dad, parents saying, we need to figure out whether we're all going to sleep together tonight or whether we're going to separate you know uh muhammad will sit here my other son will sit there my daughter will sleep there because in the case that we're bombed maybe there's a chance that we have at least one survivor at least one survivor to tell our story and then they have

to balance between that representation someone surviving to tell the story or maybe it's better that we all just you know face the same fate so that there's no one left to to carry that burden or to carry that emotional um heaviness so that's those are the conversations and the decisions that you know they're making on a day-to-day basis and then here we have all these luxuries all these privileges all these blessings so yes we want to use their um pain as a um as something that propels us not limits us we don't want it to cripple us but it's difficult sometimes it's difficult sometimes to be resilient um to have productive sadness there is sadness which propels you to move to advocate to work it gets you up each and every single day it gives you purpose it reminds you of why you're here it reminds you that there are very very difficult prejudices that people have there are very bad

assumptions that people make about us being muslim about arabs And so we have a lot of work to do. So use that energy to do good, to change people's misconceptions, to be ambassadors of goodness and to be reason that people see Islam for what it is, not for what it is portrayed as. Our job is to help people process this in a way that they don't just generalize and otherize other communities.

Oh, everyone is like this. Oh, you know that problem, right? Muslims are like this. Christians are like this. Jews are like this. No, no, no. Let's step back and let's, you know, let's not make these sweeping assumptions and let's try to understand the history, the context, the politics assumptions and let's try to understand the history the

context the politics and let's try to work within the parameters to do good and to bring communities together rather than push communities apart while at the same time standing firmly for the justice of our own community right the voices of our own community because that is something that of course matters to us and we feel it's a it's a responsibility to have their voices projected at her. What role does faith play in dealing with everything that's going on? So faith gives us an entire repertoire of stories of healing, stories of overcoming trauma, stories of resilience. Faith gives us a lens through which we're able to understand why this is happening. When God loves people, he tests people to bring them closer. So faith allows us to see what's happening as a reminder

to check ourselves, to renew our intentions, to check our priorities, to focus on that vision, that mission that we have to do good and to leave a legacy of goodness behind. So faith has been very instrumental in allowing us, of course, to not only cope, but also understand and heal and also use it as an opportunity to propel and to do again, to do as much as possible for the people that are being affected by this directly and indirectly. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you.

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