Enjoy highlights from our Faith & Moral Courage event series: read the interview of Kolbassia Haoussou, Rihab Azar, and Aarif Abraham. To watch the full event and discover more content from Faith & Moral Courage event series, subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Question
What are the challenges you face and overcome to continue pursuing hard work? What does courage look like for you?
Kolbassia Haoussou
I think courage is defined by actions. Every action we take represents our courage and what motivates us to take action. There are only two things that motivate us to take action: fear and love. We allow either love or fear to take over and motivate our actions. Everything you see in society is motivated by those two. For me, courage is the action you strive to take every day in your community, your society, toward other people and towards yourself.
Rihab Azar
I think courage means different things in different phases of your life and situations. I’m mindful that I will be answering from where I am now in my life. I think courage plays a huge role in breaking free from what we consider a static structure, whether it’s an institution or something else. We want to move from the static to the dynamic. It takes courage to move from one to the other, whether you’re trying to establish some kind of system or trying to break free. I think courage is always related to risk. With risk comes vulnerability and responsibility. When you’re being brave, you’ll often be uncertain of the outcome, which is a very vulnerable place to be. I think courage is also making sense of what you know, making sense of what’s happening now, what you’re doing, what you want to do, and also seeing what could be, what’s not here, what’s not in the past, not in the present or not necessarily yet planned for the future. Courage requires a great imagination.
Aarif Abraham
Courage has three aspects. One is abstract, the second is about my personal experience, and the third is about fear and risk.
I think of courage as an or disposition towards the difficult. A lot of my work focuses on assisting the marginalised, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised. It puts me into proximity with harm, injustice, and individuals who’ve suffered immense horrors. So when I talk about courage, I’m automatically talking from a privileged position. I’m not in a conflict zone and I’m not immediately being affected by catastrophic climate change. Although I have picked a profession that entails sacrifice to family life or relationships, that completely pales into insignificance when you are actually talking about victims and survivors.
What does courage mean for them? Accountability. Imagine being in an authoritarian state with no rule of law, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of speech. Your agency and ability to achieve justice is very, very difficult. Courage entails risks to themselves and to their family. Courage also entails fear. Fear raises all sorts of doubts and questions about agency. The question is how do we respond to it? And that brings me to a poem by Mark Hartley called Be Still.
while you worry about what each note means,
the band plays on.
you are running from a dog
who only chases because you run.
turn and face him.
though you hear the buzzing of the bee grow louder
be still.
do not fear a sting you have never felt,
you just might be a flower.
do not worry
about things falling into place.
where they fall
is the place
For me this poem really speaks of the power of an inward orientation. How do we present ourselves in the face of the unknowable, the unquantifiable, the hopefully improbable danger which we may not have faced previously?
Question
Rihab, you said recently in an interview, ‘all I came here with was my culture and my music. And my music is how I share my love for people.’ You left Syria and you’ve made London your home. Could you please talk about your relationship between living here in the UK and your music, which is rooted in such rich and ancient traditions of Syria?
Rihab Azar
Music for me was a massive integration vehicle which helped me feel that I can have a good life here. Education was great, but music was what I was ready to share. I hope people can see that I play with passion, I play with desire to come together over moments of listening and sharing music. Through music, I’ve been able to meet many interesting people from very different cultures. I learned also through those encounters how rich this country can be because of the multiplicity of different influences. I feel that I can be home because home is everyone and there are so many different kinds of people. Home is when I see a place that has so many different languages, looks, cultures, food and ways of expression.
Question
Aarif, as a human rights lawyer, what do you need to consider when you try to obtain justice for people, and how does this relate to courage?
Aarif Abraham
Law is at best an approximation because laws are crafted by us. All sorts of bargaining happens when laws are created and they fall very far short of moral obligations. I often like to think about courage as taking place over three stages. The first is seeing injustice. The second is acting. The third, even if you can’t speak out against injustice, is about thinking about injustice. Of course, it might be absolutely impossible for a victim or survivor already marginalised and disenfranchised to act. It might be impossible for them to speak, but at the very least, they may be able to think about it. This brings us to a question which we all might relate to. What are our obligations and responsibility, knowing these stages of courage? Whether we are lawyers or musicians or NGO activists, I think often we have to ask ourselves, when is it too late? Is it already too late now? When is it our responsibility to engage in these steps of courage? Often we only see that when we’ve got to a stage where it’s too late, where we talk about revolution or we talk about catastrophic climate change, which has already happened. The question is, when do we start acting courageously in order to prevent these harms in the first place?
Question
What can we learn about courage from people who are rebuilding their lives in new and unfamiliar places and have sacrificed so much to be here?
Kolbassia Haoussou
The organisation I work for now, and have done since I came to the UK in 2005, helped me rehabilitate from my experiences of torture. During the period of rehabilitation when I was coming toward the end of my therapy, it wasn’t a good place. I felt vulnerable and thought I would be targeted again. The aim of torture is to silence you, to make you question yourself, question your freedom, question your voice, not allow you to be a human being. Rehabilitation aims to undo all of that. At that time, I was thinking that if I don’t speak up or use my voice, then I will have become a coward. I said no, I don’t want to be identified as a coward. So I wanted to use my anger. I was angry about what happened back home and also about what happened when I came to the UK. I was treated really badly, but one thing that I learned from my grandmother is that no matter how angry you are, it is not the individual person in front of you that caused it. Make sure not to put that anger on anybody else, only put that the source that created the anger, not anybody else.
I came up with the idea of using my voice. I want to show people that no matter how you persecuted me, no matter how you tortured me, you will never silence me. But my voice alone is not strong enough. I wanted to show torture survivors that we have a power. That’s my motivation, that’s what gives me the fuel to use our courage for the better of society and the world.
Question
We live in dark and uncertain times where we’re increasingly fearful of each other and of differences. Beyond courage, what qualities do you think that we need to develop to create a more peaceful, hopeful home and world for future generations?
Arif Abraham
I think there are three qualities I would identify. The first is attentiveness and awareness. The second is hope. The third is love in its widest conception. Awareness has an aspect of recognising and acknowledging that we are all in some way interdependent and interconnected. That means justice and injustice, wherever it is, is interconnected and interdependent. There’s a wonderful book by Rebecca Solnit called Hope in the Dark and she discusses an analogy drawn from mushrooms. As many of you might know, mushrooms are the sprouting body of fungi and fungi are all intimately connected through the mycelial network. The mycelial network is intimately connected to the plant network and plants use that network underground to communicate and transfer resources. It’s a beautiful analogy because in much the same way justice and injustice is connected in this manner. If we see injustice, we all know it’s not far removed from us.
We all know that the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine has led to price increases in our oil and gas. Similarly, we know that the harm suffered by Yazidis and others has led to massive flows of displaced people and deportation which has impacted all of us and impacts resources in Europe as much as the courts and justice systems. We can’t ignore justice far away because it has a direct and immediate relevance to all of us and it brings us critically proximate to harm. We might not feel the harm ourselves but we can understand it.
The second quality is hope. I don’t talk about hope in a passive sense but instead much more in an active sense. It’s not just a hope in something changing in some way, but actually taking the reins of hope by using skills, knowledge and networks to make the most change, even if it just means speaking out about injustice.
The final aspect here is love. I’m reminded of a quote by Professor Cornell West who said that justice is what love looks like in public. Love does not mean that you see the other and just accept everything. It means accepting critically their otherness, their difference, their distinction, the fact that they are unique. It means being able to accept someone fully but still retain our individual identity and uniqueness. The idea that justice is what love looks like in public means that we’ve reached out to a sufficient extent in our society to address the wrongs and the harms and achieved an outcome that has benefited the person who has been injured without necessarily destroying the person who has done the harm in the first place. I think if we can get even halfway to achieving that sort of justice then we’ll have advanced greatly as a civilisation.
Kolbassia Haoussou
For me there are three things which are really important if you want to figure out the image of God: caring, sharing and compassion. With those three elements, fear will never enter your heart. We need to be caring for the stranger and we need to be sharing because there’s enough for everybody, and we need to be compassionate.
I think we use the word compassion and compassionate quite often and sometimes we don’t understand what we mean. Compassion is based on your understanding. Being compassionate is understanding when another person is in a position of vulnerability and being able to put yourself in the shoes of that person. It’s understanding that whatever happened to that person can also happen to me. When we care about our neighbour, ultimately the neighbour will care about us too. Whether that person has a Syrian passport, whether that person has a Sudanese passport or the person has a Chinese passport, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, we are human beings with aspirations, goals, and only a desire to live a peaceful and happy life.
Rihab
Curiosity is really important in living collectively. Being curious about what responses, for example, you have to something or someone. When we are self aware, we get so many valuable pointers at the things we need to work on. For example, why do I react to you the way I react? If I look into that, it teaches me a lot about what I am equipped with already and what I need to be more open minded about. Empathy helps here because empathy is so much related to being aware of your privilege and not taking anything for granted. Another quality that is really important for us to understand is that there’s not going to be instant gratifications when it comes to big and heavy things. We need to educate and nourish that sense of historic being. We’re all historic beings and we come do our bit. That cohesion is very important. Viewing ourselves as like a part of a historical, very long and possibly slow process is an important thing as well.
Question
Some of the issues and problems that we’re facing in the world are intractable and they have no end in sight. At what point does one say I’ve done enough?
Rihab
I think the easiest way to look at it without going insane is to not have tunnel vision. As people going about our business in daily life, the act of courage is in everything we do such as the values we live by, the interactions we have. I think there is pragmatism around how to balance living a good life with being courageous and also being a positive member of society.
Question
How do we trust our instinct on what our relationship is with fear?
Kolbassia Haoussou
Courage and fear both have positive and negative attributes. For example, too much courage can lead you to your death. Similarly, there can be positive fears. For example, it was a positive fear that forced me to flee torture to a space of safety. During that period when I was fleeing, I learned to understand and appreciate my instinct. During that period, I was also really fearful of any human being, I had trust in humans because they were dangerous. From there, I started to learn how to really play with my instinct. I’ve come to learn that any decision made by trusting your instinct has a certain amount of risk, which allows us to further exercise courage.
This content is a segment of an extensive event series exploring what faith and moral courage look like in an age of polycrisis. Where does extraordinary courage come from? What can we learn from people who’ve risked everything to live up to their values? What forms of courage are especially needed in our age of unravelling, uncertainty and risk? How can we inspire ourselves and each other to grow our capacity to brave our limits? Are there insights from the world’s spiritual and faith traditions that can help us grow our courage?