The University of Toledo
Spring Commencement 2007
Sunday May 6th 2007
Commencement
Address
The Empty Inkwells, The Queen’s Bath and
the Pursuit of Happiness:
An American Journey
By
S. Amjad Hussain
Professor
Emeritus, Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
The
University of Toledo College of Medicine
and
Op-ed
Columnist
The
Toledo Blade
Introduction
of commencement speaker by
Mr. Richard Stansley
Chairman,
Board of Trustees
The
University of Toledo
Introduction
of speaker
By
Richard Stansley
Chairman Board of Trustees
The University of Toledo
It is my very
great pleasure to introduce our commencement speaker, Dr. Amjad Hussain. Dr.
Hussain is professor emeritus of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at our
University of Toledo College of Medicine.
A
versatile man of many talents, a renaissance man, Dr. Hussain is also an award
winning photographer, an internationally recognized explorer, a community leader
and an award winning author who has written eight books on as diverse subjects
as religion, culture, history and international relations.
Since
1976, Dr. Hussain has visited Pakistan annually to teach at Khyber Medical
College, his alma mater, in Peshawar. He has been a visiting professor to
various institutions in Pakistan, China, Libya, and India and also in this
country.
Among
his unique endeavors is the exploration of 2,000-miles of Indus River in
Pakistan in three separate expeditions starting in 1986. In 1996 his Team Indus
was the third group in history to reach and explore the source of the Indus
River in Kailas (pronounced Kylaash) mountain ranges in western Tibet.
Dr. Hussain has
taken on leadership roles in numerous organizations in the greater Toledo
community. Among them, he has served as president of the Islamic Center of
Greater Toledo, the Toledo Surgical Society, and the Academy of Medicine of
Toledo. On a national level he has served as president of the Association of
Pakistani Physicians of North America and Khyber Medical College Alumni
Association of North America. In 1994 he endowed a visiting professorship for
his alma mater Khyber Medical College at the University of Toledo College of
Medicine.
Through
his writings in Toledo Blade and many other publications he has brought a
moderate voice of reason to the often heated and partisan debate on
geo-political and religious issues. In 2000 he went to Afghanistan during the
Taliban rule and reported for the Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a series
of articles titled The Secret World of the Taliban. Those revealing articles
were published two months before the attacks on 9/11.
We
are pleased to have Dr. Hussain as our guest this morning, and I am proud to
introduce him to you.
Dr.
Hussain.
Commencement
Address
The
Empty Inkwells, the Queen’s Bath and the Pursuit of Happiness
An
American journey
President
Jacobs, Members of the Board of Trustees, Members of the Platform Party, ladies
and gentlemen and graduates.
I
am deeply honored and extremely grateful for your kind invitation to be the
commencement speaker this morning.
What
a joy to look at the sea of colorful robes and regalia and see the beaming
smiles of proud families and friends who are part of this very important rite of
passage in your life. Parents, grandparents, spouses and siblings are ever so
eager to observe and record this important milestone. I know the feeling for I
have also been there.
This
scene reminds me of the time when a proud father strategically positioned
himself near the stage to snap a picture of his daughter receiving her coveted
diploma. Just as the young lady was about to come on stage another father got in
front of him and obstructed the view. The man tapped the intruder on the
shoulder and said, ‘Hey buddy, I have spent $100,000 of my hard-earned money
to get this picture’.
With
your indulgence I wish to interject a personal note at this juncture. This
morning I miss the presence of two very special women in my life. Had they been
alive they would have felt a measure of pride and satisfaction that only a
mother and a wife can feel on such occasions.
My
mother was a woman of sharp intellect, wit and uncommon wisdom who made sure her
children received the education that she was deprived of as a child and as a
young woman. The other woman was Dottie, my wife and soul mate of 38-years and a
nurse par excellence.
These
two women touched my life and my being in the most positive way with their quiet
grace and their unfailing support of whatever I chose to peruse in my life.
I
am grateful to the University of Toledo-College of Nursing for accepting my
family’s offer to start a Distinguished Visiting Lectureship in Dottie’s
honor.
I
dedicate this address to the loving memory of those two women.
A
commencement address is a time-honored and a wonderfully redundant exercise
where a speaker stands between the graduates and their degrees and causes
unnecessary delay in the subsequent celebration that families and friends have
planned. In this frame of mind you will soon forget the person who spoke at your
graduation and also, I assure you, much of what I am going to say.
This
was brought home to me rather vividly a number of years ago when I met this
young and smart critical care nurse at St. Charles Mercy Hospital here in
Toledo. She had recently graduated from Mercy College of Nursing where I was the
commencement speaker at her graduation. With some excitement of being
recognized, I asked who was the commencement speaker at her graduation. I
don’t remember, she said. And neither did she remember anything worth
remembering that the speaker had said.
I
was too embarrassed to tell her the truth.
So
you see I am very cognizant of the transitory and fleeting nature of this
exercise. I am mindful to be short, brief, interesting and perhaps amusing. It
is a tall order and is not unlike when a 6th grade teacher gave her
class the assignment to write a short essay which should incorporate the
elements of religion, royalty, intrigue, suspense and drama. One young girl came
up with a perfect example. She wrote:
OH
MY GOD, THE QUEEN IS PREGNANT. I WONDER WHO’S DONE IT.
So I beg your indulgence as in the next twenty
minutes I share with you my observations and my perspective as an immigrant to
this country and tell you that as members of this society and as members of a
broader global community your ideas are important to tackle myriad challenges we
face at home and abroad. And that you have a choice and a voice to
articulate those ideas.
My
journey from the dusty little town of Peshawar located at the crossroads of Asia
near the famous Khyber Pass in northwestern Pakistan to the city of Toledo in
1963 did not look too significant at the moment. I left home, as most young men
and women do on such occasions, with a heavy heart and a rich album of memories
for the new world. I had fully intended to return to my roots to pursue an
academic career in surgery.
At
the time I had thought that my future and my destiny lay in the land of my
ancestors. I had naively assumed that seemingly sharp and impenetrable barriers
of culture, religion and language separated me from the people of the West. To
put it in proper perspective it was barely 16 years after the independence of
India and the creation of Pakistan when I left home. The memories of a mildly
benevolent but still an apartheid British rule over India were still fresh in my
mind. There were lines that we natives dare not cross. Very simply we did not
have a voice.
So
with that heavy baggage and lots of preconceived ideas about America I got off
the boat, figuratively, 44 years ago here in Toledo.
Immigrants
to a different culture follow one of the three paths while trying to adjust to a
new life in a strange land.
Some
of them live in the past surrounded by comforting sounds and smells of a land
they left behind. They live virtually in a physical and psychological ghetto.
This is a common narrative of most first generation immigrants.
Then
there are those on the other extreme who soon after their arrival dive into the
avant-garde culture of the host country- a culture that is strange and alien to
even some Americans. They emerge from this cultural baptism as new persons,
cleansed of their past. Unfortunately such baptism does not change the color of
skin, facial features or the foreign accent.
There is however a third choice, a difficult one and that is to integrate with the host society and act as a bridge of understanding and a voice of reason between two disparate worlds.
As
a South Asian Muslim I have followed that path. In this process I did not find
my religion or my cultural underpinnings to be contradictory to the idealism of
America.
I
have been the recipient of unconditional kindness, generosity and grace by the
people of my adopted land. I have received much more than I have given. There is
a prevailing sense of justice in appreciation of one’s ability in this
country. This is something that is uniquely American and is hard to find in the
rest of the world; certainly not in
Perhaps
it is because ours is a country of immigrants. Except for Native Americans, we
all came here from someplace else. Some of you arrived on the Mayflower and some
of us a few hundreds years later by jetliners. And to this day people come,
drifting on rickety boats across vast expanse of oceans or trekking the
inhospitable Arizona desert, to the shining city on the hill as John Winthrop
the Governor of Massachusetts described America so eloquently in 1630. We may
have come with the uncertainty of today but we all had a promise of tomorrow.
According
to the Declaration of Independence all of us have an unalienable right, along
with life and liberty, to pursue happiness. There are many ways we could define
happiness.
One
could equate happiness with bulging shelves at the grocery store or seemingly
unending lines of new cars at a car dealership. But to equate happiness with 19-
brands of toilet paper or long isles of soft drinks in a grocery store is to
demean the very concept of that pursuit and dare I say the true meaning of
America?
To
me happiness is the ability to think freely and express freely without the fear
of a midnight knock at the door.
All
of us as citizens of this great country have unrestricted access to Public
Square where we are free to exercise our unalienable
right to express our opinions no matter how weird, unpopular or unpalatable.
Personally I prefer a noisy and boisterous public discourse to a maddening and
deafening silence in public arena.
Within
those boundaries I have tried to explain the events unfolding in parts of the
world that may not be of interest or may not be well understood by many of my
fellow citizens. One could say that I have tried to narrow the widening and
yawning gap between the East and the West and specifically between Eastern and
Western religious traditions. It has not been a cakewalk. Rudyard Kipling, the
irrepressible champion of the British Raj, had said:
Oh
the East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.
And
the echoes of that famous line are being heard with more frequency and with
increasing ferocity.
Since
the fateful day of September 11, 2001 my task as an op-ed columnist has taken on
new urgency because I sense an expectation by some of my fellow citizens that I
should condemn my religion for the crimes of some of the followers of Islam. It
would be like throwing out the baby along with the bath water.
Nine-Eleven
destroyed much of the amity that Muslims had developed with other religions in
America. More than that it has critically silenced a meaningful dialogue between
Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Through
out history man has invoked the name of God to wage war against others. Time,
reason and tactics might be different but invoking the name of God remains
constant. A poem from WWI illustrates this point rather well. It was written by
the English poet Seigfried Sassoon:
‘Gott strafe
God this, God
that and God the other thing-
‘Good God!’
said God, I’ve my work cut out!’.
Like
two huge tectonic plates Islam and Christianity have collided many times in
history and the reverberations from this collision were felt far and near and to
this day we see those fissures visible in as distant places as the Middle East,
the Balkans and parts of Europe.
But
there have also been times when Christians and Muslims and Jews rose above their
religious differences and worked in harmony. For five centuries from 750 CE to
1258 CE, the period of history known as the Golden Age of Islamic Civilization,
one sees an unprecedented cooperation and collaboration between Muslims and
non-Muslims. Together they spawned a dazzling explosion of arts and sciences in
Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Spain and a few centuries later in India during the
Mughal rule.
Looking
at those accomplishments even through the fog and haze of present day distrust
and paranoia they look dazzling. It was made possible only when there was active
participation of all citizens of the realms and when Christian and Jewish voices
were heard along with those of Muslims.
Pray
tell, why then the same religion that provided a milieu for such cooperation and
collaboration is now being called the source of all evil in the world? Faith and
reason have become the buzzwords now when discussing Christianity and Judaism.
But those concepts were put to test and followed by Muslims centuries before the
Reformation. No, there has not always been the clash of civilization as
popularized by Samuel Huntington.
The
simple answer is that colonization of the Arab and Muslim lands by the emerging
European powers of the 15th century changed that dynamic.
In
the post Colonial era in the Muslim and Arab lands a mindset has developed that
tends to blame all their shortcomings on the effects of Colonization. Lost in
this rhetoric is the fact that we the Muslims have also lost our intellectual
and scholarly pursuit.
Muhammad,
the Prophet of Islam had famously said that the ink of a scholar’s pen is more
sacred than the blood of martyr. In a macabre reversal of that noble saying, for
some, the blood of a terrorist has become more sacred while we have let our
inkwells run dry. Add to that the political injustices that have been meted out,
from Palestine to Kashmir to Chechnya to Kosovo to Afghanistan, and you have a
perfect milieu for disenchantment, extremism and terrorism.
Now
what all this geopolitical turmoil has to do with you, the newly minted
graduates of this university?
I
respectfully submit that it does.
It
would be an understatement to say that the world has changed and has become much
smaller in the past 50-years. What happens in one corner of the world affects us
all. But we have lagged behind in our approach to and understanding of
the world that once used to be remote, distant and somewhat exotic; a world we
used to access through the pages of the National Geographic or BBC Radio. Now it
is up close, in the face, real life and in real time.
All
of us are given choices in life. Many times the choices we make determine our
destiny and our legacy. Those choices make the difference between a life spent
in pursuit of happiness that is not limited to the plethora of choices available
in the grocery store and a life spent in pursuit of happiness that makes a
difference to others.
Martin
Luther King Jr. had said, "Every man must decide whether he will walk in the
creative light of altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is
the judgment. Life's persistent and most urgent question is 'what are you doing
for others?"
Once
upon a time, (I love that fairy tale beginning), there was a benevolent king
whose beloved queen fell ill of a mysterious illness. Despite all efforts her
health continued to deteriorate. In desperation the royal physicians suggested a
milk bath. The king decreed that each household supply a pitcher of milk for the
common good of the kingdom.
The
town criers went through the labyrinthine streets of the city and announced that
every household was to deliver a pitcher of milk to the royal bath outside the
city gates.
All
through the night residents of the city-- peasants, artisans, professionals,
traders and shopkeepers-- carried clay pitchers on their heads to the outskirts
of the city and emptied them in the royal bath.
Each
household had assumed that one pitcher of water in a bath full of milk would not
be noticed and it would not make any difference.
It
did.
And
it still does.
I
would like you to keep this story in mind when you go about making choices in
your life and carve out a comfortable niche for you and your family.
There
is enormous poverty and hunger in the world and even in this country there are
pockets of deprivation. People are poor for no fault of theirs. When you are
asked to extend a helping hand just remember this story.
There
will be times in your life when you will see injustice meted out to those who
cannot defend themselves. You will be called upon to stand up for those
disenfranchised segment of our society. You must share with them some of the
milk you will carry.
You
will also see bigotry and prejudice- may it be racial, social, political or
religious- towards your fellow citizens. You will be expected to stand up and
scream bloody murder. To look the other way would be like pouring water instead
of milk in the bath.
The
fabric and texture of our society is enriched by the presence of the arts, the
music, the community theater, service clubs, libraries and such. As productive
members of the community you will be expected to help with your time and your
money. Just imagine if the Libbyes, the Stranahans, the Knights, the Andersons
and the like would have remained oblivious to the needs of this community. I
hope you will do your bit.
All
of you have worked extremely hard to earn the diplomas that you are about to
receive. This first-rate education will open the world for you. You have reached
this milestone with the help of many people who have helped you climb this
difficult ladder. You ought to remember the fable of queen’s illness and the
pitcher of milk when you are asked to help your alma mater. America is great
because of its institutions of higher learning and institutions thrive when
alumni become part of their future.
And
don’t forget your teachers who, in all fairness, made you what you are. They
are the real architects of the America of tomorrow but seldom get the credit or
their due for that awesome responsibility. We all owe a perpetual debt of
gratitude to these noble men and women. Whenever you can go back to your
university, college, high school and your grade school and say thank you.
Last
but not the least you should also apply the parable of Queen’s bath when it
comes to your own family. Before the relentless pursuit of success takes you
away from your primary responsibility as a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife or
as a parent do not forget that charity does begins at home. Your family would
also need some of that milk.
Now
I assure you it is not easy to balance a big, seemingly bottomless pitcher
filled with the milk of human kindness, grace and charity on your head and walk
a tight rope of responsibilities the rest of your lives. But then the ceremony
you are about to participate in has, hopefully, prepared you for that
difficult walk.
To
do so is the real pursuit of happiness and to this hyphenated American the real
meaning of being an American.
In
the end the choice will have to be yours. To remain silent or oblivious should
not be one of the choices.
Let
me conclude with the wise words of the 19th century American army
general, poet and orator Albert Pike: ‘What we have done for ourselves alone
dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is
immortal’.
I
wish you the world.
S. Amjad Hussain