Resilience

Islam taught us to be progressive and resilient. These concepts are not foreign or alien to Muslims as the Quran and the Prophet (saw) demonstrated injunctions and traditions to be of service to mankind, to be useful members of society and to face challenges and difficulties as trials for a higher station of iman and taqwa.

Resilient may be a relatively new term in our life vocabulary, but it certainly is not new in terms of how the Prophet (saw) and his Companions dealt with various challenges and trials, some worth mentioning include the blows the Prophet suffered at Taif and the repeated attempts to seek support for the eventual migration of the Muslim community. The Prophet and his Companions did not lament and despair over the difficulties. In fact the Quran contained verses to remind believers not to despair, and that every difficulty comes ease.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point gave an interesting example of how the City of New York eradicated street crime. Every train that was vandalized during the night (at the depot) will be repainted to its original paintwork before it is used for passenger service. Similarly all glass windows that are broken will be replaced and fixed as no trains with broken windows by vandals were allowed to run for passenger service.

It will appear that this approach will incur high cost, as each act of vandalism will be replaced by new paintwork, new glass windows or any repairs needed. To allow the trains to operate with graffiti and broken windows will reinforce the perception that the authorities are not in control of the city, and will only encourage vandals to do more, and worse.

When a vandal graffitised a train, he or she felt elated to see their graffiti on the train. But when the vandals did not get to see their graffiti and realized that the authority had repainted the train even before it got out of the depot, they eventually gave up their vandal act, as it no longer served their misplaced pride.

Malcolm Gladwell attributed the eradication of such crime to the idea of tipping point, a point at which transformations happed. We could also infer that the City of New York demonstrated resilience to reach the tipping point. Resilience is evident if the organisation or entity become stronger and more effective when faced with, or overcoming a challenge. Resilience, in this example, means to bounce back stronger (than before) from a crisis or calamity.

In Tel Aviv, debris and clear blood stains immediately are immediately cleared and cleaned when a bombing incident happened. Damaged buildings are repaired almost instantly to return to normalcy. When citizens knew that their government was able to turnaround situations at fast speed it created confidence and renewed strength to handle similar difficulties and challenges in the future.

A resilient community is also defined as one that does not lose its identity, belief, principles or set of values when faced with external challenges. A Muslim community that is religiously resilient, therefore, holds strongly to Islamic principles, morally and spiritually strong and are top of the changing context and the challenges of modern society.

This however does not imply that the community creates enclaves to self-preserve or protects itself. Rather than becoming a hermit, the community contributes to, and benefits from the interaction and engagement with others. A resilient community deals with the challenges as positives and views it as opportunities to develop and grow.

Through it, the community become more self-confident and stronger.