The Acquired Taste for Ruin

Not long ago, footage surfaced of our oppressors gathered in a hall, watching the destruction of Lebanon. They cheered. They laughed. They raised their glasses to the ruin of a country. And we were right to be sickened. Only a hollowed-out people, we said, could rejoice at such a thing. We were right.

But, my brothers, my sisters, I must place another picture beside it, and ask you to look at it with me honestly. When their cities have been struck, some among us have celebrated too. There has been cheering. Footage has been shared with delight. Sweets have been passed in the streets.

There was a time, and it was not long ago, when the people on this road understood force the way the Prophet understood it. As a heavy thing. A last resort. A grief, even when necessary. He took up arms only to defend the defenseless, and never with a light heart. The Imams who fought, fought reluctantly. Force was the bitter medicine one accepted to prevent a greater sickness. It was never something to enjoy.

But in some, a taste has slowly developed. First it was the taste for striking back, which felt only like justice. Then it was the taste for watching the striker fall, which felt only like relief. Then it was the taste for the image itself: the building collapsing, the smoke rising, the enemy on his knees. And once the eye learned to drink that image, it began to look for it. This is what an acquired taste does. It begins as something endured, becomes something accepted, and ends as something craved.

I know the reply. They started it. They are worse. What they have done to us has no comparison. Much of that is true, and I will not pretend otherwise. But this is not the argument of Husayn. Husayn did not say that because his enemies had grown cruel, he was free to grow cruel also. If the worst conduct of the enemy is permitted to set the ceiling for our own soul, then he is no longer our enemy. He is our teacher. He is shaping our interior, and we are taking the lesson while believing ourselves to resist it.

And here is how you know the lesson has been taken. The appetite has begun to spread past the original enemy. I have heard, with my own ears, voices among us cheer for the burning of the Burj Khalifa, as if it did not matter who was inside it. I have heard calls for the ruin of Arab cities, the striking of their water, the collapse of their infrastructure, as if the people inside those cities had become invisible the moment their government displeased us. A heart that has learned to enjoy ruin will, given time, find new ruins to enjoy. The taste rarely stays where it was first directed.

Now I must say something to those of us who are not physically in the war. Brothers and sisters, we are all working to overcome oppression. Those inside the war do so with their bodies. The war has come to their door. Ours is a different kind of struggle. It happens on the media, yes, but more importantly, it happens in the soul. Our main task is to make sure that, in the very act of resisting, we do not become like the oppressor.

This is where Husayn becomes our teacher in a way we have not fully understood. He is not only the inspiration of those who resist with their bodies, though he is that, and gloriously so. He is also the inspiration of those who resist in the soul. And the soul, brothers and sisters, faces two enemies, not one.

The first is the fear that makes a human being bow to oppression. The second is the rage that makes a human being mirror it. Husayn refused both. He would not bend, and he would not be remade. He kept his shape under pressure that should have flattened it, and he kept his shape under hatred that should have infected it. That double refusal is the whole of him.

And when he said never to humiliation, he did not mean it only for himself, or only for his family, or only for his people. He meant it for the human being as such. He did not want humiliation to exist anywhere, in any direction, against anyone. A man who has truly received that lesson cannot cheer when humiliation is visited on another, no matter whose flag is flying over the ruins.

We do not need less resistance. We need resistance that follows him in all three ways at once. Brave in the body. Brave in the soul against fear. And brave in the soul against the slow temptation to become the very thing we resist.