I Wanted to Ask God About Hunger and War. I Was Afraid He’d Ask Me the Same Question

Omar Suleiman has a line he reaches for when the conversation turns to hunger, war, and poverty. He wanted to ask God why those things are allowed to exist. He was afraid God might ask him the same question. The sentence sits near the middle of his conversation with Lex Fridman, after God, death, and childhood, and before tyrants, paradise, and a dog dying of thirst. It is not a slogan. It is a transfer of the question from heaven to the person still standing in the room.

Suleiman’s work sits on both sides of that transfer. He is a Muslim scholar and a civil rights activist, founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and a professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University. Fridman introduces him as one of the most influential Muslims in the world, and as someone he is now proud to call a friend. The episode was meant, Fridman says, to explore the history and beauty of Islam and of Muslim communities. The two of them still reached Israel and Palestine.

Fridman says he cannot treat that subject as a purely scholarly file. He intends to talk with people on every side: Muslims and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, refugees and soldiers, scholars and extremists. He knows the approach will make enemies, and that he will make many mistakes. The disclaimer is clumsy and sincere. It is the frame in which Suleiman later talks about his mother, and about what it costs to keep looking at other people’s pain.

Fridman’s first question is the largest one in the room: who is God in Islam? Suleiman answers almost by rearranging Quranic sentences. God is the most compassionate, the most merciful, the creator of the heavens and the earth. He is one. He begets not, nor is he begotten. He is omnipotent, beyond human limitation and beyond imagination. Then comes the clause that does the real work: he is always reachable through sincere supplication.

“When you call upon him alone, one God, he is closer to you than your jugular vein,” Suleiman says. The Quran says so. The image is spatial; the point is institutional. There is no clergy, no church hierarchy, no one who can atone in your place. God speaks to people through the Quran. People speak to God through prayer. The distance between them is one sincere call.

A religion with no intermediary puts the whole weight on the person. No one is baptized for you. No one confesses for you. No one signs at the last minute. That, Suleiman says, is why the submission Islam asks for is so hard for so many people. God is described as perfect, and still “so accessible to the imperfect.” The attributes are far; the access is near.

The hardest motion in prayer, Suleiman says, is putting your face on the ground. He cites Malcolm X, one of the most famous American converts, on the first prostration: lowering all of a person’s dignity toward something unseen, pressed to the lowest point. Submitting every affair to God is, in that picture, a physical act before it is a doctrine.

His explanation then turns psychological. Many people cannot make that motion, he argues, for reasons that are not theological. If a person’s relationship with parents and other authority figures was damaged, the phrase “ultimate authority” does not sound like comfort. It sounds like a threat. God is imagined as one more person who will hurt you. “You have to relinquish control, and you can’t relinquish control without trust.” To trust God you have to know him, and to know him is to love him.

Suleiman’s own path ran through difficulty. His mother was long ill with cancer and repeated strokes. He grew up with racism in South Louisiana. Those facts can become a wall between a person and God, or a road toward him. “Many times people put a barrier between them and God because they can’t make sense of the things that are happening in their own lives,” he says. They project anger at God and, at the same time, deny the belief he thinks every person is born with.

The sharpest self-diagnosis in the hour is that people want to be their own gods. They fashion a deity that still lets them remain the final author of their fate. What they worship is their own judgment, in sacred clothing. When the plan fails, there is nowhere to go. Admitting an all-knowing God, by contrast, is what he calls liberation: you trust his knowledge over yours, his wisdom over yours, and the string that was always taut goes slack. In Arabic, he notes, that liberation is kin to the word *islam* — handing yourself over.

Islam, Suleiman spends a long stretch explaining, has a mechanism of intention, *niyyah*. If the value of an act depends on motive, then the unreligious-looking parts of a day can be revalued. A morsel of food placed in a spouse’s mouth counts as charity. Which foot you enter a room with, and which foot you leave with, has a word of remembrance attached. There is something to say before you eat and before you sleep.

A companion of the Prophet Muhammad said, in a line Suleiman quotes lightly, that he sought reward for his sleep the way he sought reward for his prayer. The point is not wordplay. You sleep in order to recover, and you recover in order to do useful things the next day. Once that chain of motive is pulled straight, sleep enters the ledger of worship.

“You eat to nourish yourself so that you can do great things,” Suleiman says. “You seek to be in a position of independence and of being sustained so that you can sustain others.” The Prophet’s line that the upper hand is better than the lower hand — the giving hand better than the receiving one — sits inside the same ethic. It is not a call to flee the world. It is a call to rewire ordinary acts so that eating, sleeping, and earning are not ranked by piety of appearance but by the direction of the intention. Nothing, in this view, is meaningless. Every pursuit is finally a pursuit of God.

When Fridman asks about his mother, Suleiman’s pace drops. His father is still alive. His mother was a devout woman and a poet. She wrote, before social media, about oppressed people, from her homeland in Palestine to the genocide in Bosnia. Every conflict drew her in. Suleiman’s childhood pictures of her are mostly in prayer clothes. He says he remembers her in those clothes more often than in ordinary ones.

She had more than one stroke. Each damaged a sense. One left her partly deaf. Then comes the sentence that is the most moving part of the episode. She would sit in a gathering, quiet, smiling, and tell her son *alhamdulillah* — all praise be to God — that she could not hear. She could still tell, from the change in people’s faces, when they had started to gossip. She was glad not to hear it, and glad not to carry the sin of listening.

At her funeral people described another habit. If you were new, or standing in a corner, or felt left out, she was the person who scanned the room, found you, and pulled you into the gathering. Even after speech and hearing were impaired, a smile and a warmth were enough. Fifteen years after her death, Suleiman still hears the same line: no one ever treated me the way your mother treated me.

When he thinks of people of faith, she is the first person who comes to mind. Her body kept failing. She did not grow bitter. She moved closer to God until her last breath. She would shed tears over people she had no connection to, without a feed pushing distant suffering into her hands. The empathy, he says, was hers. It was not a notification.

Fridman asks whether he misses her. Yes, Suleiman says. Then he adds that he feels everything he does is an extension of her. He quotes the Prophet: when a person dies, only three things continue to benefit them — a continuous charity, knowledge that still helps people, and a righteous child who prays for them. He wants to be that child. Not only in prayer. In charity in her name, and in treating people the way she taught him to treat them.

“There are some times where I don’t feel like getting out of bed, sometimes where I don’t feel like doing for myself, but I actually feel like doing for her.” The sentence lowers “live for others” from a sermon to a weekday. You do not need a fresh private reason every morning. Sometimes one person is enough. He believes he will see her again. He believes every good thing he does will benefit her. He believes it would make her proud.

Fridman asks what losing her taught him about death. Suleiman says the facade of the material world was made evident to him very young. Most parents try to shield children from everything. His parents tried too. His mother downplayed her own pain so that he and his brother could have ordinary lives. His father, a distinguished and busy professor, would still show up as the only father on a school field trip, so the days would look like other families’ days.

They also let the boys see that some things other children did not see. “The material world disappointed early on so that we could see beyond it.” He often tells people that orphans and refugees who later do remarkable things saw through the facade young. After you see it, he says, there are two roads: bitter or better. There is no third option, and no one else will choose for you.

He chose prayer, charity, and commitment, and placed his bets on something that would not disappoint. “If I believe that there was nothing to life except for life, I would be a very bitter person. But because I know that there is more to it than this, I am able to exist in it without being depressed by it.” His one-line summary is “existence is transcendence.”

On what happens after death, Suleiman is specific. The Quran describes a path from darkness to darkness. God brings you out of the darkness of the womb — you were, he says, “nothing but a dirty drop of fluid” — into a fully proportioned human life. You live it. You go into the darkness of the grave. You are resurrected again.

The distinction he insists on is this: we are souls with bodies, not bodies with souls. The difference is large. The body is a container, a vehicle for this stretch of the journey, the thing that touches everything in the material world. You are not the container, and this existence is not the whole of you.

“The soul continues,” he says. This life is for worship and for living according to the purpose God set. After death the soul goes on, toward reward or punishment or a mixture of both. He calls that destination “a realm of accountability.” The phrase is more precise than a two-station map of heaven and hell. What it emphasizes is that the account has to be settled.

Fridman turns to the hardest question: why there is suffering, and why there is cruelty. Suleiman does not dodge. He first assigns responsibility. God has given enough food — enough, he says, for everyone in the world to have a 3,200-calorie diet a day. God has also given enough guidance for human beings not to inflict the cruelty they actually inflict. “We don’t blame God for the evil of man.”

Then he goes to a second layer. In his wisdom, God allows outcomes we cannot fully grasp. The first analogy is a baby in the womb. You cannot explain to a fetus that has not yet developed its senses the world it is about to enter — light, sound, air. The second is more domestic. A child wants to put a toy in its mouth. You stop it. For a moment the child is sure you hate it. You are preventing it out of love, and it has no capacity to understand that love.

“You are trying to make sense of a pixel when you can’t see the bigger picture.” If God explained every incident, the act of trusting him would lose its point. An all-knowing God who can be fully audited turns faith into arithmetic. Suleiman splits God’s action into two columns: what God commands us to do, which is the roadmap toward good, and what God allows to happen, which remains inside a providence no outcome escapes. Once the columns are separate, human responsibility for human deeds is clear.

“I can’t rationalize that for you because my understanding is relegated to the immediate experience in front of me. But if I know God… then I don’t have to make sense of the plan, but I can tell you that I trust the planner.” Peace, he says, is there. Without God and without a hereafter, trying to make sense of decree always fails, because compensation would have to be paid in this life, and many people leave the world uncompensated. If the world is only random atoms colliding, he asks, what greater thing is there to trust?

He cites a hadith with a hard image. On the Day of Judgment, the person who lived the most difficult life is dipped into paradise once and asked whether they ever saw sadness or hardship. The person says: what sadness? What hardship? What misery? Some commentators think the figure is the Prophet Ayyub, Job. Suleiman puts the picture on his mother. Every moment she suffered will be repaid and raised. Those hardships shaped the person she was, and will shape the reward she receives. “The recourse is certain to me as a believer.”

In the Quran, God says he will place a vicegerent on the earth. The angels ask whether he will create a species that will spill blood and cause corruption. God’s answer is one sentence: I know that which you do not know. Even the angels have to lower their heads. Angels, in this account, love God, worship God, and obey without desire, will, or choice. They were made to worship. And still they are told they do not know.

Early interpreters, Suleiman says, read the line this way: God knows that out of this human enterprise some people will emerge who make the whole thing worth it. There will be criminals and corrupt ones. There will also be prophets, sages, and saints. Unlike an angel, a human being has desire and choice, the possibility of righteousness and of wickedness. Some will choose worship, charity rather than cruelty, service rather than destruction. Those people, he says, can rank above the angels, because they lived a life that included the option to do otherwise.

Islamic sages, he adds, have described the human being as able to sit anywhere on a line from animal to angel, and lower still, to devil. The animal state is appetite without calculation: no thought for whose territory you have entered, no limit on how much to eat. Many human lives, he says, are that state with a larger appetite, because human desire has no ceiling. The demonic state is different. His anatomy of the tyrant is the coldest passage in the conversation.

Tyrants, he says, do not necessarily like killing. They are indifferent to other people’s existence. You become an object for them or against them. They will discard children, people, and other people’s rights because the highest pursuit they have chosen is maximum power, a place with no limit on self-fulfillment. Everyone else is a threat or an opportunity. Indifference is the precise word. Atrocity does not need hatred as fuel. It only needs other people taken off the list of persons. After that, the rest is logistics.

Every moment, Suleiman says, contains a set of choices. The Prophet described a person strolling in paradise because he had removed something harmful from the road. He also described a woman who had lived by prostitution. One day she was thirsty, saw a thirsty dog, and said: I was thirsty, God gave me water, so I will give this dog water. God entered her into paradise for that.

“Sometimes the small moments with a small sincere deed can have a huge impact on a person’s trajectory.” Neither story waits for a grand life decision. A branch that would have hurt someone. A bowl of water for a dog. Ethical judgment here is fined down to a grain small enough that you do not need power, spare time, or credentials before you are allowed to act. Mundane minutes, chosen well, can become what he calls miraculous acts: choosing God over the self, and in the process choosing a better fate.

Fridman asks a practical question: how hard is it to know what a righteous action is, and what it means to be a good man or a good woman? Suleiman’s opening line is that truth has consequences. Do not seek it unless you are willing to abide by what you find. Many people, he says, mold the journey to a pursuit they already had. They approach religion like another product.

He cites an article by a rabbi, “The Allure of Narcissistic Spirituality.” The argument is that religion is becoming another form of self-worship. People take only the parts that make them more comfortable, only the therapeutic parts, until the practice is as secular as any other meditation. The article’s scene is a man praying in a temple. Someone walks in and bumps him. He turns and curses the person out. He has not noticed that how he treats that person is part of the path of worship. He has taken “I am being godly” as the worship itself.

“The truth has circumstances that are required of you, actions that are required of you that may be somewhat inconvenient.” You have to look for truth as it is, not for comfort and convenience. That, he says, is part of why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States and in the world, and why the growth is not all birth rate, though Muslims do have many children. After September 11, people saw Islam in the media, then checked out copies of the Quran and read. In a sincere pursuit of truth, some of them embraced a religion they had thought was the world’s greatest source of destruction, and found it the greatest source of peace in their own lives.

You have to be willing, he says, to want to know, and then willing to commit after you know. Otherwise the heart rusts. The metaphor is his, and the Quran does speak of hearts that harden. A person who knows a great deal and does nothing is not empty. They are rusted. The practical test of “seek truth for its own sake” is ordinary: read the book you assumed was your opposite, and keep the hunt for error separate from the hunt for what is true.