Maurice El-Amin: "Remember how much we should be giving to others"

Math teacher Maurice El-Amin is nationally known for leading his students from Cass Tech High School in Detroit to national victories year after year in competitions involving sophisticated math and logic games. (Watch the video below in the online version of this story to learn more about his math team.)
    In coaching these students, El-Amin is a modern representative of one of Islam’s oldest cultural gifts: the preservation and development of the body of wisdom that includes math, science and geography. During the centuries-long collapse of European civilization, the Islamic world was a haven for humanity’s brightest minds — also partly the result of Europe’s anti-Semitic expulsion of Jews, who were welcomed in that era in Muslim lands.
    But Islam — and especially the month of Ramadan — is about fully integrating one’s mind with one’s heart and entire body. El-Amin also understands this timeless calling of his faith and, most Saturdays, this noted mathematician and educator can be found with his sleeves rolled up working in a Muslim-run soup kitchen for needy men, women and children.
    Here are his words …

    I‘m here 90 percent of the Saturdays, helping with everything from setting up tables to welcoming our patrons. We don’t think of this as a typical soup kitchen that people might envision if they hear someone talk about a “soup kitchen.” These are our guests and we thank God that we can serve as their hosts and hostesses.
    We serve what we would eat ourselves. The meat we serve here is halal, which means it is appropriate for Muslims to eat. We serve fresh food, good food — food we eat with our guests. Once we’ve got things going here, we do sit down with our patrons and eat with them. There is no hierarchy here between them and us. That’s how it is in Islam.
    We do hear a lot from the people we serve that there are soup kitchens where they have to “sing for their supper” or where the people serving them wind up making them feel kind of, well, lowered when they come for food. Here we welcome our patrons, thank them for coming and we let them know that we are all part of the same community — even though most of our patrons are not Muslim.

    Most of us are just a couple of paychecks away from needing a meal like this. Especially in a part of the world like Michigan, especially with the way our economy is at the moment, we know that we’re all a part of the same community and any of us could be in this situation so easily.
    I have been fasting since I was 12 or 13, but I have to admit that the first couple of Saturdays in Ramadan, as we are serving the meal here — yes, it is hard to be around all this good food. Yes, it is a challenge to prepare this meal for our non-Muslim guests — but that’s a part of Ramadan, isn’t it? And so we do it throughout the month.
    If I could share one thing about Ramadan with non-Muslims, it would be to explain this important point — that Ramadan is a sacrifice for ourselves as individuals, but it’s also a time of refocusing your whole life. It’s a time when we remember how much we should be giving to others.
    In addition to our meals here, we do even more during Ramadan. We’re part of a whole national network of Muslim centers who organize a special Day of Dignity during Ramadan for people to come and enjoy food and services and here we do it in Cass Park on the 13th of September, this year. Other cities do it on various days during Ramadan and in various places. Caring for people who need this kind of help isn’t just a nice thing to do — it’s a pillar of our religion and it’s a pillar we especially remember in Ramadan.
    It takes a lot of work to organize this, but we do it every year. It’s in many different cities across the whole country now, places like Chicago and Phoenix, Arizona, and it’s on the East Coast. It will be around the middle of Ramadan in most places, but there are different dates in different cities. Most of the people who come to the Day of Dignity will not be Muslims, but this is who we are as Muslims and this is the way we see our responsibility to the whole community.

WANT TO SEE El-Amin in action at a practice session with his nationally award-winning math team? Last year, while still reporting for the Detroit Free Press, David Crumm co-produced a short YouTube video on El-Amin’s team. CLICK on the video screen below to view it — or, if you don’t see a video screen in your version of this story, you can click here to jump to YouTube and view the video there.

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