At the lowest point of his life, when all hope for his new community of the faithful seemed lost, Prophet Muhammad heard these words — “we reveal to you the most beautiful stories.”
In the darkest moments, Rami Nashashibi said in his Interfaith Lecture Friday in the Hall of Philosophy, it is important to remember the power of beautiful stories.
Like the Interfaith Lecture Series Week One theme, “Potluck Nation: Why We Need Each Other to Thrive,” presented in partnership with Interfaith America, Nashashibi is many things — MacArthur Fellow, sociologist, musician, professor and activist who co-founded the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. He was joined by Drea D’Nur, the co-executive producer of his album This Love Thing, who opened the lecture with a stirring performance of the track “Pressed” off the album.
To drive home the impact of a beautiful story, Nashashibi recounted what had led to the moment when the prophet heard those words of revelation.
Muhammad’s beloved first wife had died, he had lost his political protection in Mecca, and when he traveled to nearby Ta’if seeking refuge, he was betrayed and pelted with stones.
It was at this moment that the prophet heard the words and heard the chapter of the Quran that tells the story of Joseph — a story of a man betrayed by his family and sold into slavery, only to rise up to great power and be reconciled with his family.
“In some way, the Prophet Muhammad, immediately in that moment, is being allowed to see his story in the story of Joseph, saying, you’re going to be alright, you’re going to be OK,” Nashashibi said.
Immediately following this revelation, the prophet traveled miraculously to Jerusalem, where he was able to commune with the 124,000 prophets who have visited all the peoples of the world, what Nashashibi describes as “the ultimate act of spiritual solidarity of the human family before he ascends into the heaven.”
“What to take away from this?” Nashashibi asked. “Many things. But for me, chief among them is the beauty of beautiful stories, especially in oppressive, dark and difficult times — the divine as a beautiful storyteller.”
On the wall at the headquarters of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in the South Side of Chicago is a quote from the Quran. It can be translated as “what is the reward of good other than good,” Nashashibi said, but it can also be translated as “what is the reward for beauty other than beauty.”
Nashashibi talked about the work of IMAN in trying to fulfill that mission, including building the first and only memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago and re-tracing the path of his 1966 march into redlined white suburbs.
One of the people there that day in 1966 was Rabbi Robert Marx, who was asked to attend the march as a neutral observer by local Jewish congregations but felt he could not stand on the side. Nashashibi worked with Marx in later years and said the late rabbi’s work inspired much of his own work with IMAN.
“One thing that Rabbi Marx taught me is that the best way to agitate for change is not to simply demand that the perpetrators of the injustices are somehow out in the exterior, but to invite in an examination, to call in, to call up, and not just to call out,” Nashashibi said.
That message informed IMAN’s work in every aspect, from trying to end the harm being caused by some corner stores to addressing structural inequalities. One of these structural inequalities is life expectancy. Chicago has one of the largest life expectancy gaps in the country, Nashashibi said. In the seven or eight miles from Englewood to Streeterville in downtown Chicago, life expectancy changes by 32 years.
This gap “is built off decades of criminal disinvestment, decades of urban segregation, decades of policies, yet we would all be part of the problem if we suggest that all of us are not part of that problem — we are part of that story,” Nashashibi said. “An invitation of a Rabbi Marx’s agitation is to welcome that you are part of the story because we choose to live elsewhere.”
For Nashashibi, he relates to the story in part through his maternal grandfather — a Palestinian refugee who moved to Englewood in 1952.
“Up until his dying last breath, which was recently, right before his 98th birthday, he would never stop talking about his love for two things: 63rd Street on the South Side of Chicago and his village outside of Jerusalem, Ein Karem,” he said.
Nashashibi’s mother was born in 1948 as her family fled Ein Karem. Even as Nashashibi works to remedy the life expectancy gaps in his beloved Chicago, another life expectancy gap weighs on him — the roughly 42-year life expectancy gap between those living in tents in Khan Younis in Gaza and those living in Israel about four miles away.
“The biggest pain that has animated that consideration is the idea that Palestinian life is not only not equal, but it is not even within the realm of what we would acknowledge as worthy of human sanctity of all life,” he said.
The term Palestinian has been used as an insult, Nashashibi said, as when President Donald Trump used it to describe New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. When Nashashibi spoke to former President Joe Biden about the ongoing war in Gaza, he said that the idea that every hospital, school and church that is bombed is a Hamas command and control center “belied basic seventh-grade logic.”
Nashashibi made clear he did not want to undersell the horror of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas that launched the war — he himself was at the Ben Gurion airport and swept up a child to take into the bomb shelter as rockets flew overhead.
“Yet since that day, every intellectually grounded, credible international human rights entity can call it for what it is and has become,” he said — genocide, citing the Israeli historian Amos Goldberg. “To use that term, somehow now has been connoted with diminishing the value of Jewish life.”
Confronting the disparities on the South Side of Chicago and confronting the disparities in Gaza requires a similar approach, he said.
“It is a collective endeavor, one that we as the human family, and certainly the human family in this country, are very connected to, and in this moment, we have an opportunity to speak beauty into the face of those that want to deny the collective humanity of each and every one of God’s sacred children,” he said.
He reflected on a tradition during the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem — the same spot where Muhammad communed with the prophets — that pilgrims would walk around the sacred space in one direction, except for those who were brokenhearted. They would walk the other way and would be greeted and comforted and prayed for by the rest of the worshippers.
“I would suggest that today, more than ever, we need to continue to see and invite each other to see the beauty in one another, especially — especially — in structural, systemic ways when that beauty has been denied, especially when they attempt to criminalize and penalize and punish those that have the strength and courage to call for the collective beauty of our human condition,” Nashashibi said.
