Planetary Boat People

Muslims definitely still have a sense of taking care of one another. Things like homelessness in the Muslim world are still really shocking. There is the account of a Mauritanian scholar, Shaykh ʿAbdullāh, who saw in the street a man who did not have a shirt on, and asked first whether the man was mad — because in their country one would never not wear a shirt in public; for them it would literally be a sign that somebody was mad. It is the same with shorts; that is something he had not quite grasped yet, because their culture is still very, very modest. He was told that the man was probably homeless, and he said: what does that mean? He did not know what it meant. He literally did not know what it meant, because in that country one can build a house — they just take tree limbs, and the women will sew burlap sacks together and make a little house, and one does not have to pay property tax; one just sets up shop. So he had no concept of being homeless. And then he said, with all of this — there is so much here, because he was coming from a place where there is nothing — how is it that somebody could be without a place to sleep, with all of this? It was something that his intellect really could not quite grasp. That is very interesting.

A really interesting book to read about this is Winners and Losers in the New World Order^* by Jacques Attali. He talks about this phenomenon of people increasingly becoming accustomed to what he calls planetary boat people. That is what he calls them: planetary boat people. One goes to the cash machine and the bums are there, and we just become inured to it, because it just becomes more and more difficult for people to deal with.