Global Focus

Setting Our Own Pace

Shadaab Rahemtulla , Canada, Saturday 22 December 2007

After Friday prayers, I went with a bunch of friends for a hike on Grouse Mountain – the Grouse Grind, which is also known as “Mother Nature’s Stairmaster”. The hike is about 2.9 km and has an ascent of about 850 meters - approximately one and a half times the height of Toronto’s CN Tower. Hence, it is not exactly a nature walk.

I had gone into the Grind looking forward to directly competing with the other hikers present. Little did I know how experienced and athletic they were. Despite the fact that after about seven hundred meters I was experiencing a searing cramp in my abs and a burning buildup of lactic acid in my thighs, I continued to keep up the pace just so that the hikers around me would not take me for some novice. Hence, my pride kept my chin up and refused to allow me to come to terms with my own amateur experience; my arrogance contributed to my torture.

I knew I was not going to make it.

By the time I had reached the first quarter mark of the hike, my morale had changed considerably as I realized that I would never be able to complete this hike in a timely manner if I continued to directly compete with the other hikers. Hence, out of necessity I would have to use more long-term thinking by pacing myself with very slow and steady steps. In other words, I would have to embark on the difficult and humbling task of setting and living up to my own expectations and not the expectations and goals of the other hikers - I would have to focus on thinking about the bigger picture (completing the Grind) and not worrying about hikers passing me by. I rather reluctantly employed the strategy.

Sure enough, an hour and ten minutes later I had finished the hike. Standing on the summit with my fellow brothers staring at the sprawling city below, I realized that had I simply continued to race up the mountain as fast as I could, I would never have reached the halfway point, let alone the top. It was only because I had employed long-term thinking – pacing myself by taking what at the time felt to be incredibly slow but steady steps – that I was able to reach the summit. By humbling myself via setting my own realistic expectations, I was able to complete the task at hand.

Reflecting up there on the summit, I realized something else as well - the struggle for social change isn’t that much different.

As a community in the West, it has become all too common for Muslims to set their goals based on other communities’ expectations, rather than their own. We have been quick to compare ourselves in rather condescending terms with other much more established groups, such as the Jewish community. A compelling example of this is the classic Muslim discourse of how the Zionists have taken over the media and have monopolized each and every outlet of mass communication while Muslims lack anything in comparison. Hence, we have consistently used other communities as a reference point and a golden yardstick to live up to.

We need to be our own trailblazers.

Rather than lamenting over how other communities have made landmark achievements, we need to employ a more long-term strategy in addressing our problems. Specifically, we need to set our own realistic pace by starting from the very basics - instead of whining about how we can never get a practicing Muslim elected to a federal cabinet position, we need to humble ourselves by encouraging our brothers and sisters to get involved in student union politics, municipal affairs, campus newspapers, and charitable organizations. Hence, we need to lower our expectations considerably to make them more practical by taking on ventures that we can actually handle. Sure, working for a student newspaper, teachers’ union, or provincial official is not the same as calling the shots at Parliament Hill, the White House, or The Hague. Yet my question is this: why make the comparison in the first place?

It is only when we have established ourselves in grassroots societal institutions will we be able to create substantive change at the state level. By employing long-term strategic thinking – setting our own pace via lowering our expectations – we may appear inferior and lacking in the short-run, but we will be a force to be reckoned with in the years to come.


* Shadaab H. Rahemtulla is a graduate student in history at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia). Email Shadaab with your thoughts and comments at srahemtu@sfu.ca