Faith, Fear, and Courage

WHEN IT IS prayer time, Rami Nashashibi prays. His Muslim faith is the core of his life and work, inspiring the two decades of advocacy he has done on behalf of the poor and marginalized on the South Side of Chicago.

But when prayer time arrived on an unseasonably warm day in December, Nashashibi paused. It was just days after the terrible terrorist attack in San Bernardino, where extremists calling themselves Muslims murdered 14 people and injured many more. Nashashibi was in his neighborhood park with his three kids, and he found himself suddenly struck by fear at the thought of praying in public and therefore being openly identified as Muslim at a time when so many equated that term with terrorist.

That neighborhood park happened to be Marquette Park. Fifty years earlier another man of faith stood not far from where Nashashibi was standing, and he too felt fear. That man was Martin Luther King Jr. He had come to Chicago in 1966 to raise awareness about discriminatory housing practices on the South Side. His march through Marquette Park was met with racist sneers and vigilante violence. A brick thrown his way actually hit him in the head and brought him to his knees.

Nashashibi had been studying this history closely. His organization, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), is leading the effort to erect a statue of King in that area—which would be the first significant memorial to King in Chicago.

In the same place, 50 years apart, two men of different faiths faced a similar question: Would their faith be the victim of fear or the source of courage? Thousands of fellow protesters were watching King. Three Muslim children were watching Nashashibi.

NASHASHIBI SHARED this story with President Obama on the historic occasion of the president’s first official visit to an American mosque. It visibly moved Obama, to the point where he included the story in his address to the annual National Prayer Breakfast the next day.

If you read the whole speech, you’ll see that Nashashibi’s story fit into a larger theme that had been on the president’s mind for some time: faith, fear, and courage. Calling fear a “primal” and “contagious” emotion, Obama confessed to feeling it himself frequently, but he continued, “if we let it consume us, the consequences of that fear can be worse than any outward threat.”

We need faith-inspired courage to stand up to our enemies when they are strong and our friends when they are wrong, Obama emphasized.

He went on to quote Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it ... The brave [person] is not [the one] who does not feel afraid, but [the one] who conquers that fear.”

Obama moved on to cite his own Christian faith, which he said gave him grace and courage in the face of very real threats and very palpable fear. On a daily basis he needed to, in the words of the Bible, “put on the full armor of God.”

Reading Obama’s speech gave me insight into the decisions of two great men, who looked to different faiths for courage when faced with fear in the same park 50 years apart. King got up and marched. Nashashibi knelt down and prayed.