Lawyers spread the word of compassion with launch of Charter

By Darise Ogden

INSPIRED BY his late father, Abdul Rahim Rasheed QSO, criminal barrister Aarif Rasheed has sought to make compassion a word on everyone’s lips. On Thursday, 12 November, the Charter for Compassion was unveiled to the world, and on Sunday, 15 November, Rasheed and Kiwilawyers’ Taufil Omar helped launch it in New Zealand at the Ponsonby Mosque, with people from all three of the Abrahamic faiths – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish – present and reading from the Torah, New Testament, and Koran together.

“When I go around the community, almost on a monthly basis, I’m told a new story of how [my father] helped somebody, how he was kind or compassionate in some way,” said Rasheed. “So it was really appropriate for [the Rasheed Memorial Dawah Trust] to become the partner to the Charter for Compassion in New Zealand.”

The Charter for Compassion is a worldwide movement that had its genesis in a wish made by Karen Armstrong, a world authority on the three Abrahamic faiths. Armstrong’s wish was granted when she won the TED Prize on 28 February 2008. Through the TED prize, the Charter was developed and a website that would facilitate the spreading of its message, http://charterforcompassion.org/learn, came into being. That message has now spread to over 100 countries.

The Charter, said Rasheed, is based on the Golden Rule: treat others how you’d like to be treated. The website itself says, “The Golden Rule requires that we use empathy – moral imagination – to put ourselves in others’ shoes. We should act toward them as we would want them to act toward us. We should refuse, under any circumstance, to carry out actions which would cause them harm.”

It’s a movement that seeks to inspire through acts of compassion and kindness, said Rasheed. It’s about reclaiming religion from those who fight in the name of it, and steering it instead towards all that the Charter stands for. “The Charter explicitly recognises that faith especially has been misused and has failed to be compassionate in the past,” he said, “and therefore we have to reclaim, making up for lost ground, and also [acknowledge] the failures in the world today.”

The three tenets behind the Charter are Learn, Share, and Act. “You learn about the Charter, you can share the Charter’s message, which is just about spreading the movement, and then the other thing is to act,” said Rasheed. The website enables those who have been touched by someone’s act of compassion, or those who have done something someone else is touched by, to upload or note that on the website. In so doing, they will inspire others to do the same. The whole idea is to inspire, inspire, inspire, he said.

Rasheed and Omar, through the Rasheed Memorial Dawah Trust, have continued the work of Rasheed’s father, with the Trust currently working to raise money for the tsunami-devastated villages in Samoa.

The tsunami hit a day before Rasheed and Omar were due to arrive to continue work on the regeneration of a mangrove area the Trust had been working on with women from a local village. “When the tsunami hit, we were actually going there to do our second lot of mangrove planting, and the day the tsunami happened was the day before we were supposed to go, so we still ended up going, but then we turned our efforts to humanitarian,” said Rasheed. “And then we got so involved with it and we realised that there were a number of logistical issues there, and we were on the ground and could help.”

Having distributed several thousand dollars worth of aid on that first trip after the tsunami, Rasheed and Omar returned to New Zealand determined to do more, including putting up tsunami appeals in local mosques. Their second drive is to collect $110,000, which will pay for food packs for 1000 families. In the short time since their return, they have already raised about $50,000, with most of it coming from New Zealand’s migrant community.

Both Rasheed and Omar, as trustees of the Trust, are committed to getting “down and dirty” with the people the Trust is committed to assisting, which is why both of them were on the ground helping in Samoa. The ethos behind the Trust is to engage people of different faiths and cultures and beliefs with each other using constructive projects, especially sustainable ones, said Rasheed. Working together, experiencing each others cultures and faiths, helps people to move from a culture of tolerance to one of appreciation.

It was this ethos that informed Rasheed and Omar’s decision to initially target New Zealand’s migrant community when it came to raising the money for the food packs. “What we’re trying to do as second generation New Zealanders, we’re trying to facilitate migrants being a little bit more engaged with local projects.”

Now, Rasheed is looking to the legal profession to help raise the rest of the money. Using the example his father set – “He had a history of getting his friends involved in community work” – Rasheed is hoping lawyers around New Zealand will embrace the movement behind the Charter. “What we’re hoping is that compassion will be infectious, and because people can connect it to a Charter, they can actually identify with something themselves, and they can identify with something everyone else is identifying with.”

For more information on the Charter, or to help raise the balance of the money needed to provide food packs for 1000 families, go to http://rmdt.org.nz/index.php.

NZLawyer, 27 November 2009