By Ustadh ubaydullah evans“I was once riding behind the Prophet (upon him be peace) and I recited to him one hundred couplets from the poetry of Umayyah ibn Abī aṣ-Ṣalt al-Thaqafī. Each time I recited a couplet, the Prophet (upon him be peace) would say to me, “Recite more!” until I recited one hundred couplets, whereupon the Prophet said, ‘He nearly embraced Islam.’”
By now, it appears the whole world knows that Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock during the live broadcast of the Oscars. And if it weren’t for one of the most strenuous branding campaigns in modern show business, the public might have taken the unfortunate incident at face value: Will Smith lost control over his emotions and unjustly slapped Chris Rock for an ill-conceived joke. However, in the process of building a multi-media empire, the Smiths have opened intimate and sometimes unsettling details about their personal lives. As a result, social commentary on the incident has framed Will Smith as everything from a vengeful cuckold trying to reassert his masculinity to a tutored soul, reliving the trauma of watching his mother suffer domestic violence. The carousel of public opinion continues to spin: biting, satirical, pseudo-therapeutic but very rarely introspective. For the Muslim community, I see two issues of interest here. First, should we even care about this? Does concern about what happened between Will Smith and Chris Rock represent an unjustifiable descent into the inane and vulgar? Secondly, as opposed to either aimless schadenfreude or psychological quackery, is there anything we can learn about ourselves and our tradition from this incident?
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