The first and foremost mentioned attributes of God in the Qur’an are Rahmaan and Raheem, which according to most interpreters translate to something along the lines of:
Rahmaan – The One who is full of compassion and mercy
Raheem – The One who’s compassion is bestowed upon His creation
The Qur’an also mentions humankind being created and placed on the earth as vicegerants of God – Khalifa (2:30) – they have been created with some kind of fragments of these divine moral virtues – with the whole, ultimate, first-and-end origin and source being God.
Thus, the greater the levels of compassion and mercy a person encompasses and practices, the greater his soul is spiritually developed, and the closer he is to its origin and source – i.e. God.
In this article, we will examine the differences between the two concepts in human terms, what they are with some everyday human life examples.
Being a compassionate person (rahmaan) and putting compassion in action (raheem) are two of the divine virtues that are most important for a moral, social and natural order in the world.
Though just as important as it is to practice them is to know how the two are interrelated in everyday life. It can be easy to assume that the two are one and the same, being that they are used similarly in common parlance – both used to describe treating someone with tenderness, caring for them emotionally and physically. However, the distinction between the two, though subtle, helps determine how you should approach a situation, and the way that you relate to anyone/thing, both through positive experiences and negative ones.
In certain situations, being a compassionate person and practicing compassion can result in the same actions being taken, from very different places of reasoning, and, in others, different justifications will lead to very different actions being taken for the same situation. All of these factors lead to definitions that require nuance to understand and care to execute through practical actions. But, though understanding the two in both how they are alike and how they differ, our attempts to help those who need it most in the future will be all the more effective and all the more lasting.
Practicing compassion does not always require being a compassionate individual, and being a compassionate individual does not always require the implementation of compassion towards others. Though as already mentioned, the two are often interlinked. This is because of how each individual impulse arises from different places – to have compassion for someone, you need to put yourself in their shoes, and attempt to empathise with them, understand their situation and where they are coming from.
Practicing compassion, however, is a type of action. To act with compassion towards someone is to treat them tenderly, with care and generosity, typically taking an active stance and contributing to someone’s wellbeing through actions. However, this can also be reactionary, responding to something with compassion and kindness when the easy approach would be to react harshly, or to shut someone down. The key difference here, at least in the standard, most basic definition of the two, is that, while you can be a compassionate person while practicing with compassion, practicing compassion has to do with external stimuli, while being compassionate is a process that happens internally, when you choose to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and imagine how they might view and reflect on the world around you.
Understanding this difference can be complex, especially with how intermingled the two are, but this difference impacts greatly the way you interact with charity, comfort, or interpersonal negotiations.
To simplify this explanation somewhat, let’s examine a few examples of these behaviours in action. An example of acting with compassion without being a compassionate person would be, for example, donating money to a cause that you are not personally invested in. Let’s say that you find a cause online that you feel is morally just – for the sake of the example, let’s say you choose to donate to UNICEF. To donate would be kind, and choosing to do so is an objectively kind action, as your charity would go directly towards supporting people who need your help, but it is not inherently compassionate: you can choose to donate without considering the lives of the people you are supporting, or how they would use the funds that you helped contribute to. You can simply think that UNICEF is a worthy charity, and donate knowing that you are helping create a more just world, which is a perfectly moral and beneficial action to take. You can act compassionately without always being compassionate, and this is often necessary in order to prevent exhausting yourself emotionally.
On the other side, you can also exhibit compassion, and practice empathy towards other people without immediately impacting their lives by acting kindly towards them. For example, you can have someone confront you negatively – let’s say, in this scenario, someone rear-ended your car while parking and left without exchanging insurance information with you. You cannot act kindly towards them, since they have already left the scene, but you can still choose to regard them compassionately, by considering the circumstances in their lives and how they might impact their decision, even if it harmed you. Without ever meeting this person who impacted your life to a negative end, you can consider that maybe they were in a rush to get to work, which they might lose if they run late, and that they had dependents who needed their financial support. You might consider that they were in a rush to get to an emergency situation, and so couldn’t have stayed to exchange insurance information, even if they wanted to.
By reframing this behaviour, you choose to practice compassion towards that person, something that is entirely internal and does not outwardly change your behaviour, nor the way you would confront them, if you were ever given the chance. In fact, acting compassionately does not even have to involve forgiving a person who hurt you, or acting kindly towards them. It is simply a way to process emotions, and consider all sides of a situation as being enacted by people who are driven by complex human needs, and allowing yourself to process your own emotions thusly.
In this case, practicing compassion can have a person benefit, since it helps you process anger and frustration in a situation where neither emotion has any benefit to you, without projecting those negative emotions on the people around you.
Now that we’ve established the two behaviours, being compassionate and practicing compassion, as distinct, but overlapping, we can begin to understand how the two impact each other, and how using both in certain situations can improve one another.
Martin Luther King Jr. is quoted as saying, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” Being compassionate and practicing compassion can function in very much the same way sometimes. While both, perhaps more so than love and power, can function independently with relatively little grief, the fact of the matter is that both are much improved when they act in tandem.
Without compassion, it’s practise can sometimes fail to view the full extent of the situation, causing the person acting in kindness to apply their resources and energy to the wrong ends. Practicing compassion, like any motivation, can be misguided, and used to ill-effects – like the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Without the compassion to understand what a person truly wants and needs, you can try to act compassionately towards them, but wind up coming across as condescending to them, or as though you are trying to take their agency away. Sometimes, giving money to someone who is looking for you to pitch in and help with your own direct actions can feel to them like you’re taking them as charity, rather than trying to help them as a person. Likewise, the same can happen when you’re only being compassionate, without any kindness in the equation. Feeling compassionate can feel like you’re helping in and of itself, but without additional action to put that compassion and energy into real support, it can appear toothless, and even self-centered, to people who well and truly need your help.
For example, you might have all the compassion in the world to someone who has been injured, but, without the action to actually offer a helping hand, such as some first aid, or a ride to a hospital, they won’t actually get any better. The two, when used together, improve one another, working to add agency to compassion and nuance to kindness.
With all this being said, there is a third dimension to these behaviours: judgment and wisdom (Hakeem). Judgment is a poorly understood subject, often taken to mean offering bad faith to your fellow human beings, or seeing your peers in the worst possible light, and, if taken to bad ends, judgment can be that and that alone.
However, that doesn’t encompass the full scope of judgment and judiciousness, and these behaviours are very important to be exercised carefully and to their most beneficial extent. Plain and simple, to practice judgment is to consider all facts of the situation before attempting to take action, and this can be more difficult to implement than just that simple definition might imply. Rarely in life do all facts of a situation at hand present themselves clearly and in an organised manner, and, most of the time, you have to choose to act based only on a few facts and a couple of observations that you’re able to make immediately, without truly having the time you need to reflect and deliberate as you would in an ideal scenario.
Sometimes, your best judgment might advise you to not act at all, which can feel contradictory – after all, haven’t we just said that having compassion without taking proper action can be self-centered? However, without judgment at all, compassion and compassion in action can be just as destructive as they are helpful, and that’s why it is so important to practice judgment and wisdom regularly, so that you are able to make correct judgment calls on the fly without freezing up. Just like any muscle, your critical thinking skills require practice and exercise in order to be strong and healthy when you need to use them most.
Consider, for example, the following situation: someone has been injured in a workplace accident, and you are able to help them. Looking at the situation through compassion, you’re able to tell that they are in pain, and that they need you to comfort and support them through this. Considering it through compassion in action, you know that they need your help, and that you might be the only person able to provide that help – it would be a moral failing on your part to neglect them in their hour of need. With only these two directives, it would be tempting to attempt to care for the injured party yourself, but this is where judgment kicks in. With careful thinking it might be better to suspend your own needs to take immediate personal action, and to instead call for more expert help, especially since it might be dangerous to move an injured party.
The same goes for picking a charity to support. Seeing an especially emotion-provoking description for a charity might incite your compassion to donate immediately, and your instincts towards kind action will support that decision, but it is just as important to exercise careful judgment, and to research charities before you support them, to make sure that they are not corrupt, or that they are not scams that would use your money for ill rather than to direct it towards the goals you thought they would.
While judgment can feel like it is robbing the magic out of being empathetic and kind towards others, it is just as important to keep in mind and to practice just as regularly as the other two, since it can protect all parties involved, and supersedes decisions made when acting on emotions alone, which can be manipulated, provoked to act without thought, and even used to harm you and the people you’d like to help.
Another place where judgment can be very effective is when you’re trying to act with compassion and kindness not only towards other people, but also yourself. Sometimes, the person who most needs our empathy, our kindness, and our patience, is ourselves. As helpful people who want to do our best to make this world a better place, it can be easy to forget our own needs, both physical and emotional, in the quest to help other people. We can find ourselves forgetting to leave time to manage our own needs, to get enough rest and seek support when we need it, because we feel that our purpose is to help others, and not ourselves. It is never selfish to take care of your own needs, and this is something which careful judgment amd wisdom can remind us – we can help others best when we are first and foremost helping ourselves. Someone who is well-rested, emotionally sound, and not stressing about their own needs, will be better suited for supporting others, able to be a structure of support that they cannot provide for themselves.
Similarly, while it might feel this way sometimes, judgment is there to remind us that punishing ourselves is not the same as helping others. You might sometimes feel guilty for taking private moments to indulge yourself and take care of your own needs to create personal joy and comfort, because these little indulgences are not available to other people as readily as they are to you. In these times, it is important to exercise critical thinking, and recall that pleasure, comfort, stability, and joy are not finite resources, and that allowing yourselves these vital and rejuvenating influences in your life is not robbing them from other people. When we help people, both by acting compassionately and through showing kindness to one another, we do so because we want as many people as possible to be happy, healthy, and supported in our world, and we ourselves are not somehow exempt from that world. By taking care of ourselves, we practice critical thinking and careful judgment, and allow ourselves to practice compassion and kindness by showing it to ourselves alongside others. To be kind and generous to other beings is a process that includes being compassionate to yourself.
In summary, compassion is the process by which we put ourselves in the place of others, and try to imagine how their minds work, and why they come to the decisions they have, without harshly criticising their actions before trying to understand them. Practicing compassion, meanwhile, has to do with intent behind actions, and requires you to act or react with tenderness and care to other people, even when it might not be your first impulse. Both are very important, either as independent actions, or as two behaviours that can influence each other and bolster one another. One can act with compassion without being compassionate, and one can be compassionate without acting with compassion, and both have their own benefits as well as their own shortcomings.
When taken together, both are made better, but are improved all the more when exercised with wisdom, judgment and judicious critical thinking, which allows us to see through manipulation and impulsive behaviour to act in the ways that are truly beneficial to all parties, instead of simply being surface actions taken without care.
Lastly, judgment can be helpful to remind us to show kindness and compassion to those who we often neglect to show those to – ourselves. By acting compassionately to ourselves and by trying to understand where our emotions and desires come from, we can ultimately make a better world, by helping ourselves and making ourselves more capable of helping others. All of these behaviours and motivations are full of nuance and complexity, and can take some time to fully understand, but the only way to truly grasp at them is to practice them regularly, with thoughtfulness and appreciation.
These decisions, while they often appear commonplace, insure the virtuous development of individuals, and, on the whole better the lives of every living and non-living thing, not exempt to the muslim population of the planet, but including every single person, animal or plant, and the earth in which it walks on – that is to be treated with compassion, kindness, respect and wisdom.
