The
airwaves are buzzing with talk of a war on terror.
Surely
this is a war that can neither be waged nor won. There is no defined enemy, but the label
'terrorist' seems to be one size fits all. The terrorist is whoever the caller decides to drag into
his net. This is why it cannot be waged according to any understanding of the rules of engagement.
Criminals are for the courts.
Also such a war cannot be won because terror is under the control of the ones
calling for war. It is not a war that will take away their terrors because
these are their own feelings. They need instead a rational analysis of probabilities. The hidden sniper may well
get you, but not before you kill yourself with your own chosen drugs or your
lethal highways or by your own stomachs.
Hunger in Africa
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I'll
tell you what we need; a war on obesity and the first target is me. Whichever way I look at it, if I check my body mass index and find I am outside
the range for my height and build, I must have been taking in more calories than
I can use. So, alhamdullilah
for Ramadan and the battle with the nafs. It is true that fasting is
challenging, but in Scotland where suhoor ends at 5.30 am and iftar comes at
4.00 pm the struggle really begins at iftar time. How much of the available
food will you eat? How much unnecessary food will you eat? How much of someone else's share will you eat?
Reports of famine filter in all the time but it is Ramadan when they really make
an impact. My own stomach was growling a little bit because I missed
suhoor but I was shamed into forgetting all about my own pathetic excuse for
hunger when the Ethiopian Muslims began to talk about their plight. One
mother was desperate to find she was too hungry to breastfeed her baby.
Another mother declared that she had not a scrap in the house to feed her
children. A young boy solemnly said he was ready to die. Their crops
had failed apparently but we had also failed them. Write to the
government, send charity, inform others. It seemed inadequate for such an
urgent case and I knew there were other urgent cases in Southern Africa and
elsewhere. It haunted me for several days whether that woman in Ethiopia
finally found food for her family or was she and others like her left to starve?
Allah Does Not Love the Wasters
We
know the food is there. We see it disappearing down our plugholes daily,
the leftover rice that sticks to the pan, that is left on the plate. It
ends up in black sacks. Restaurants with food left over at the end of the
night don't distribute that food. They dump it out the back. Shops
with food that has passed its sell-by-date by even one day jettison the food. Food is over-produced and left to rot. Here in Britain healthy cattle were
wantonly destroyed because of 'Foot and Mouth' disease, a disease which is
perfectly harmless to humans and which can be controlled in animals with
vaccines. Mass hysteria broke out as the government assured us they were
doing all they could to control this 'lethal' disease. Meanwhile, they sent vets
roaming about the country spreading foot and mouth from farm to farm, a disease
that could seemingly be spread just by talking about it. Mass burials and
burning of healthy cattle and stock close to infected farms ensured further spread. We were told it could
spread through the air and by walkers' wellies but not, it seemed, by the
movements of wild animals. And Allah does not love the wasters.
The Prophet(SAW) once saw a man with a stomach too large for his frame and said
that his weight would look better on someone else. When I read diet
stories of women who lost large amounts of weight they marvel at the fact that
they were carrying round the equivalent of the weight of their two children.
Imagine never being able to put your children down day in, day out. What
we need according to this advice of rasulallah(SAW) is a redistribution of fat.
Redistribute That Fat!
It
is unfair to always point a finger at the US in matters of obesity because
others are following close behind including in our Muslim lands but the
Americans provide us with a blatant warning of what is in store for those who
eat too much of the wrong types of food.
These are people whose girth does not allow them to sit in an ordinary size
passenger seat or move comfortably around an ordinary sized room. People
who have to be winched out of their homes by crane when they die in order to be
buried. Such people work their way through tons of food, none of it
satisfying or nutritious, desperately trying to fill the void within.
A friend of mine was travelling in a poor part of Alabama and was surprised to
find that you could get a fizzy soda and a bag, (yes a bag) of donuts for about
a dollar but to get home-cooked whole food she had a long search and had to pay
over the odds. Why is it
that we can never get tap water milk or fresh juice when we take the children
out for a meal but there are fizzy drinks in abundance? One hesitates to
call them drinks. They neither quench the thirst nor nourish the body. You can pay 40p for a pint of fizzy and £1.40 for a small glass of pure juice. Nearly every child's menu offers a free fizzy drink.
Obviously they can't
give the stuff away.
We are created in a beautiful balance and the trick is that you only need so
much food to stay healthy. If we tip that balance our lives become
burdensome. We are recommended by the Prophet (SAW) to eat enough food to
keep our backs straight. Anyone who has
fasted even for the longest day and savoured that first date of iftar will
testify to the fact that the edge is taken off the hunger straight away.
Subhanallah! How do we know that Allah will accept our
fast because of what we eat after that? A section of the ummah do not get enough
to eat to stay healthy and another section of the ummah have come to a point
when they expect meat with every meal even though the first Muslims took meat as
a special food.
We are also taking in too much salt, sugar and fat. An excessive intake of
salt and sugar sets off a cavernous hunger that will never be filled. We
know this and yet it is a struggle to resist the
cakes and biscuits and fatty delicacies even after we feel full. Humans
were created weak.
That's why we need a war on obesity. We need a helping hand from the
powers that be. I certainly want some of my share of the world's grain and
other foods to reach my sister in Ethiopia. I know there is non GM food
that can be sent to the hungry people of
the world today. This redistribution of fat needs to be seriously
implemented. How about a rationing programme? People who go over
their comfortable weight, (making allowances for pregnant and
breastfeeding women of course) would only be allowed to buy so much of certain
kinds of food. There would be strict rules on how shops could display food
and on the food processing industry. Or there could be compulsory health
farms like open prisons where
someone supervises your diet. Any restaurant cooking too much food and
failing to distribute it would be fined. Ditto food shops! Wasted food
does not go away. It comes back to haunt us and the packaging we throw
away does not go away. It will pollute our water and soil in years to
come. We need to take away all subsidies to farmers and food producers to
remove their incentive to over produce. Set in place the principle that
everyone has to get the bulk of their food from local organic sources before
they look
further field. Yes, I am living in cloud-cuckoo land and utopia all
rolled into one. I want a war on obesity. We take up that challenge
and the war on terror will look after itself.
Sarah Louise Baker is a Muslim British novelist who
lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She embraced Islam while working in
Japan in 1990. Her novel, From Utah to Eternity, on Islamic
conversion, was based partly on personal experience. She just
finished a book about everyday experiences of wearing the hijab
(the Islamic headscarf). You can reach her at baitulankaboot@yahoo.co.uk
