In the depth of our body and soul, to experience the blessing, bound up with another, we must accept its wound as well. We come to understand that we cannot enjoy life without going through the dark and dangerous territory of the other; any attempt to escape this agonizing struggle inevitably leads to a joyless human condition.
Thus wrote, Luigino Bruni, an Italian economic philosopher, theologist, and the reviver of the civil economy movement in Italy, in his book; The Wound and the Blessing. As I landed on the Punjabi soils after a long stretch of three whole years, straight after my research trip to Florence and Loppiano, a small town twenty kilometers from Florence, these thoughts kept ringing in my head; to protect ourselves from wounding by others we either often fall flat on our blessings or overcompensate e.g., by benevolently giving from our wealth. The same sentiment is echoed in the famous phrase of Persian Mystic, Mevlana Rumi in the thirteenth century; “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
Whereas Loppiano came across as an exemplary place of abundance overflowing with the blessing of Communion, Pakistan, and Lahore in particular came across as a place of ‘woundedness’ with overriding political and social chaos and unrest with a glaring sense of social inequality quite visible in the form of poor and needy people begging on the busy roads of Lahore. Notwithstanding the fact, that it was the holy month of Ramadan where the divine Barakah overflows as is religiously believed by the Muslims.
The word Barakah in the Arabic language and in the Islamic context has three interconnected meanings:
The first one means “growth and increase”. So when something has Barakah, it increases. The second meaning is “continuity”. As believed by the Arabs when the rain keeps on coming and coming. This is a verb taken from the noun Barakah. The final meaning of Barakah is: ‘Something that remains in its place as though it sticks. So it’s not only increasing and continuing but it remains as well.
The opposite of Barakah is the scarcity or lack of something.
Incidentally, Pakistan is a place where there is an abundance of Barakah in the form of charitable giving, especially in the month of Ramadan. It is a month where the rewards for good deeds are multiplied. This is the Month of Mercy where the gate of hell is closed, and the doors of paradise are wide open. It is a month where we increase our acts of worship and are in a state of deep spirituality. It is also the month of giving Zakat, the practice of obligatory almsgiving to purify one’s wealth and gain Allah’s proximity and pleasure. Therefore, throughout the country spectacular display of Pakistani hospitality was seen in the form of open ‘dastarkhawans’, a Turkic word meaning ‘tablecloth’, for the ‘poor’ and needy to have iftar throughout the holy month of Ramadan. A beautiful example of breaking bread together to keep the Barakah flowing.
When it comes to charitable giving, Pakistan is a generous country, wrote Shazia M. Amjad & Muhammad Ali in the 2018 Stanford Social Innovation Review. As per their report, it contributes more than one percent of its GDP to charity, which pushes it into the ranks of far wealthier countries like the United Kingdom (1.3 percent GDP to charity) and Canada (1.2 percent of GDP), and around twice what India gives relative to GDP. A study conducted by Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy shows that Pakistanis give around PKR 240 billion (more than $2 billion) annually to charity. The same report indicates that about 98 percent of people in the country give in one form or another—if not with cash, then with in-kind donations or by volunteering for needy causes.
Notwithstanding this fact, one cannot overlook the sheer display of indigence roaming about on the busy roads and streets of the metropolis city of Lahore. It makes one wonder, in the light of the above-mentioned stats, if 98 % of Pakistanis allocate a portion of their wealth for charitable causes why is poverty still rampant in Pakistan? And most importantly, what are the rest of the 2 % doing who could be the direct beneficiaries of the gift economy, in the form of Zakat, Sadaqah, etc? And what are they giving in exchange for the gift of gratuitousness in return?
Albeit there is a clear distinction between gift or gratuitousness as understood in the European concept as espoused in Bruni’s book, and benevolence (Khayr) as understood in the Pakistani Muslim concept as described above in the case of ‘open dastarkhawans’ and Sadaqah giving.
First, let’s explore the concept of gift and gratuitousness in the European, particularly Italian context as we are making a comparison between the wound (of poverty) and blessing (of abundance), by taking a leaf from Luigino Bruni’s book here.
Communitas is a Group Bound Together in Interaction Involving Gift Exchange
In his 1950 work The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies Marcel Mauss analyses extensively the nature of the gift in ancient and pre-modern societies. In these societies, he documents that a gift does not express merely a freely given celebration, but a highly complex system of obligatory and obligating exchanges. Mauss concludes that gift systems have paralleled, or even served in place of, economic systems of barter or monetary exchange for goods. Mauss’s reflections on the nature of the gift directly illuminate the actual asymmetric relationships of feudal society, tight relationships of dependence and power in which the many depended on the benevolence of the few.
In his book; The Wound and the Blessing (1) which inspired me to make this comparison, Bruni, a heir to Smith’s philosophy, points out that for Adam Smith “benevolence” signified an asymmetric relationship of dependency between the powerless and the powerful, rather than the notion of a free offering of compassion between peers. This is the sense that Smith intended when he wrote that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest…Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the prevalence of his fellow citizens” (Wealth, I.ii.2).
Moreover, Mauss highlights an interesting element in the etymology of the Germanic word “gift.” In the ancient Germanic languages, the word carries a double sense: “gratuitous offering,” as the word is used today, as well as “poison.” In this dual sense, whatever advantage is accured in the gift may be offset or lost by what is required in return. Mauss sums it up, “this theme of the fatal gift, the present or item of property that is changed into poison is fundamental in Germanic folklore. The Rhein gold is fatal to the one who conquers it, Hagen’s cup is mortal to the hero who drinks from it. A thousand stories and romances of this kind, both Germanic and Celtic, still haunt our sensibilities. As Bruni mentions in contemporary English “gift” has retained the sense of “present,” whereas in German it means “poison.”
In relation to such the Latin term munus which Bruni refers to in his book is literally translated as “service” or “gift”, also being the root of two words that form a key thread in his discourse: communitas, or community, and immunitas, or immunity. Thus a communitas is a group bound together in the various forms of social interaction that involve gift exchange; the condition of immunitas is to remain outside of such a social structure of obligation, service, or duty.
In Pakistan, I have often asked my colleagues working in the charity or ‘third sector’, what inspires them to keep giving themselves and their wealth freely in the cause of ‘service to humanity’? Their answer has always and only been to acquire the pleasure of Allah by serving His creation. This makes a strong case for Pakistan, a so-called state of statelessness, heavily compensated by its people to keep the wheels of subsistence churning. For had it not been for some huge giants with this spirit of service to humanity, especially the marginalised ones, there would have not been numerous free hospitals, schools, and universities in Pakistan and many people would have died of starvation.
But how is this contributing to a somewhat puzzling state of economics in the Pakistani context?
Referring back to the economic thinking of the neoliberal or capitalistic societies of which the Pakistani economy is a by-product, failing to implement a fully-fledged Islamic economic system, considering it self-proclaims itself as the Islamic Republic. Let us then further explore the comparison Bruni makes between gift and benevolence, in the absence of markets as seems to be the case in Pakistan where benevolence is attached to religious gratification without the negative impact this might be having in the prevalent sense of paucity of the underprivileged 2% as the beneficiaries of an overflowing benevolence from the wealthiest few of the country.
In the eighteenth century, when he proposed it, Smith’s economic thought seemed ideally suited to remove the feudal, vertical, personal, immediate (or unmediated), asymmetric relationship of direct dependence or benevolence. For Smith, the market, as a mediating “third”, instead creates a horizontal, impersonal, mediated, symmetric relationship that does not depend upon one individual alone, but upon multiple competing merchants. In such a social structure, an individual is “im-mune,” or exempt from a “com-munal” system of binding obligations that constrain individual freedom and implicitly and explicitly preserve relationships of power and dependency. This then is the system that has evolved into our present economics.
Considering the sources of the world’s current economic system, Adam Smith’s late eighteenth-century seminal thought must be situated in a process of historical development. Feudalism, in which much of the European populace depended for its sustenance directly on the beneficence and goodwill of the land-owning gentry and nobility, was a powerful influence on seventeenth and eighteenth-century political and economic thought.
Pakistan as a former British colony to this date is towing the same line of economic thinking now somewhat substituted with a kind of religious benevolence that seeks gratification in charitable giving especially to help the ‘poor’. Yet, there is no consolidation amongst its numerous NGOs and charities to collectively explore the ever-enduring question; why is there still so much poverty around? And how can we collectively heal this wound of indigence?
Initially, this was true and needed after the partition in 1947 whereby throngs of migrants entered the land virtually destitute and impoverished leaving behind all their possessions in India. In the spirit of patriotic fraternity, the wealthy and resourceful people of the land adopted them by providing for them out of the benevolence of their hearts. Seventy-five years on, this seems to be the case still. And in the absence of state-run financial institutions e.g., Bait-ul-Maal, keeping up with the Islamic (Sunnah) traditions, the destitute ones are left at the mercy and compassion of the wealthy ones.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments though, Smith recalls that beneficence is less essential in the existence of society than justice. For Adam Smith when we enter the market, we no longer depend hierarchically on each other – and in the interaction of the market, we meet on an equal footing where, thanks to contract, we are freed from the dependence on, or benevolence of, others.
A Society Without Markets Cannot Be Civil
The answer thus, for me, came from Bruni who considers the market as a positive triumph of modernity, in which we can meet and exchange as peers. In short, we need markets, without which we cannot live well, but neither can we live well by reducing all social relationships to markets. In fact, he argues that the move to immunitas in markets, as seductive as it may be in avoiding relational wounds, sets a course for the reduction of all public interpersonal interaction in contractual, impersonal immune relationships. While such a system may remove some of the risks of being wounded in interpersonal relationships, the blessings and benefits are lost as well.
In a market-centric system in which interpersonal relationships in the market are instrumentalized toward the exchange of goods and services, the real scarce good becomes an authentic human relationship.
Therefore, for Bruni; a society without markets cannot be civil. There is an important, even urgent, need, he says, to encounter the dramatic mystery of the other and of the communitas without reverting either to a pre-modern world without markets or to one of the many different current forms of communitarianism. In fact, human history shows that where there are no markets it is not mutual love or love of God that takes their place. Rather the void left without contracts is frequently filled by power relationships in which the strongest replace the weakest. Bruni is convinced that a society without markets cannot be civil, yet a society that seeks to regulate human relations only through markets and contracts is even less so.
What could be the middle way then?
Let us now turn to our original title, a comparison between Loppiano, a small town of 900 people, nestled in the hills of Tuscany, and Chot Dheeran, a village in the Mandi Bahauddin district of Pakistan.
Why Loppiano, you may ask? Well, for various reasons, one of which is my recent visit to Loppiano and Sophia University therein. And most importantly, my inspiration for Loppiano as a laboratory of fraternity, home to the Focolare Movement envisioned by Chiara Lubich, around the world. It is said to be the town where the Gospel is just part of daily life.