The number of human beings driven from their homes has passed another record, and the world’s capacity for alarm has not kept pace. The Muslim Peace Fellowship speaks today for an old obligation: the ethic of refuge.
Our community’s history begins in displacement. The Prophet ﷺ and his companions were refugees; the city that received them gave our calendar its starting point and our Fellowship its name — for it is the anṣār, the helpers who housed and defended the displaced, whom we are called after. A tradition that dates itself from an act of asylum cannot be neutral about the world’s refusals of asylum.
The Qur’an commands protection even for the enemy who seeks it: grant him asylum, then deliver him to safety. How much more, then, for families whose only offense is to have lived where the bombs fell or the waters rose. We call on wealthy nations to widen, not narrow, the door; on transit states to treat the displaced as persons, not leverage; and on Muslim communities everywhere to be, visibly and practically, the anṣār of our time.