Futuwwa: The Code of the Man Who Carries

Scroll long enough and somebody will sell you a version of manhood. Here is my read of it, and I call it opinion: it measures a man by what flows toward him. Money toward him. Women toward him. Attention toward him. The finished product is a man who gets served.

More than a thousand years ago, in the cities of the Muslim world, working men lived by a code that ran the other direction. Blacksmiths, merchants, water-carriers, tradesmen. They measured a man by what flowed out of him. They called that code futuwwa.

The Word

Futuwwa comes from the Arabic word fata, a young man. Over the centuries it came to mean the noble man: the one strong enough to spend his strength on others. The standard English translation of the old manuals calls it chivalry. Europe's chivalry belonged to knights, a class raised in the saddle. Futuwwa belonged to whoever practiced it, and the men who practiced it hardest often had dirt under their nails.

The Quran, the scripture of Islam, uses the word fata for one man in particular: Abraham, the man Jews, Christians, and Muslims all honor as a father of faith. It tells how he walked into a temple full of his people's statues and broke them. When the crowd went looking for whoever did it, this is how they described him:

قَالُوا۟ سَمِعْنَا فَتًى يَذْكُرُهُمْ يُقَالُ لَهُۥٓ إِبْرَٰهِيمُ

Qālū samiʿnā fatan yadhkuruhum yuqālu lahū Ibrāhīm

One young man against a whole city. A scholar named al-Qushayri, writing in Nishapur, in today's Iran, in the eleventh century, pulled out the lesson every man can use:

The idol of every person is his own self, therefore he who refuses to obey his passions is chivalrous in truth.

The first statue you have to break has your face on it. Every appetite that runs you, every craving for approval, every "I deserve" is a small idol. The noble man breaks his own before he asks anyone else to change.

The Whole Code in One Sentence

The foundation of chivalry is that the servant of God always exerts himself in the service of others.

Everything else in futuwwa is that sentence tested under pressure. A man is measured by what he carries for others, and by how much weight he can hold without complaining about it.

The Dogs of Medina

A devout man once asked Ja'far al-Sadiq, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and a teacher in Medina still revered by Muslims today, what futuwwa meant. Ja'far turned the question around and asked what he thought. The man answered: "If we are given something, we are grateful, and if we are denied something, we persevere."

That is what the dogs here in Medina also do!

The man asked what, then, futuwwa was. Ja'far answered:

If we are given something, we prefer [to give it to someone else], and if we are denied we are grateful!

Sit with that. Grateful when you win, patient when you lose: that is the floor, and a dog clears it. The noble man starts where instinct stops. When blessing comes, he passes part of it on. When he gets denied, he gives thanks anyway, because he trusts the One who did the denying.

The Night of Cold Water

The old books record a man who was ordered by the ruler to hand over a young man under his protection. He refused. They gave him a thousand lashes. He still refused. That same night was bitterly cold, and his faith required him to wash his whole body before he could pray. He washed in cold water. Someone told him he had put his life in danger. He answered:

I would have been ashamed before God Most High that I was able to endure one thousand lashes for the sake of a creature and not to endure the harshness of washing [myself] with cold water for His sake!

Two tests in one night. The public one: he stood between someone weak and someone powerful, and paid for it in his body. The private one: nobody watching, freezing water, and he held himself to a higher standard than the one the crowd saw. Fight night is the public test. The rounds nobody films are the private one, and they decide the first.

The Street

A scholar was once arrested and marched through Baghdad to face the ruler. On the way he stopped to drink from a street water-carrier's jug and had a friend hand the man a gold coin. The water-carrier refused it:

You are a prisoner. It is contrary to the code of chivalry to take anything from you!

A man hauling water for a living, turning down gold because the other man was down. That is the code at street level.

In the 1330s a traveler named Ibn Battuta rode through Anatolia, today's Turkey. In town after town he found brotherhoods of tradesmen who called each other akhi, "my brother." Each crew chose a leader from its own trade, and the leader built a guesthouse with rugs and lamps for travelers. His verdict, in H.A.R. Gibb's English translation:

Nowhere in the world will you find men so eager to welcome strangers, so prompt to serve food.

In one town, rival crews grabbed the reins of his horses and argued over who got to host him. They settled it by drawing lots and took turns. Picture that on your block: grown men arguing over the right to feed a stranger they will never see again.

Five Tests You Can Run Today

The masters of this code left short definitions, like drills. Here are five, and where they land in a modern life.

1. "Chivalry consists in being fair [to others], while not demanding fairness [from others]." That came from Abu Hafs, a blacksmith. Pay your people on time even when your clients pay you late.

2. "Chivalry means forgetting the faults of your brothers." Your boy slipped. Once it is handled, it is gone. Stop bringing it back up.

3. "It is that you neither avoid the poor, nor confront the rich." Same handshake for the man who cleans the gym and the man who owns it.

4. "Chivalry is when you invite ten guests and care not whether eleven or nine actually come." Generosity with no headcount.

5. "Chivalry means that you are your own enemy before God." Be the first to name your own mistakes. The man who owns his errors in the corner is the one who fixes them in the next round.

Where the Code Came From

Here is the part I want every reader to see. Futuwwa grew out of a faith. The men who lived it were Muslims, and they drew every line of it from Islam.

The Prophet Muhammad taught: "None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself" (Bukhari 13, Muslim 45). He taught that God stays in the aid of a person as long as that person stays in the aid of his brother (Muslim 2699). And the Quran praised the people of Medina who took in believers fleeing persecution in Mecca and shared their homes and wealth with them:

وَيُؤْثِرُونَ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِهِمْ وَلَوْ كَانَ بِهِمْ خَصَاصَةٌ

Wa yuʾthirūna ʿalā anfusihim wa law kāna bihim khaṣāṣa

The word Islam means submission to God. The code follows from it. A man who has bowed to his Creator has nothing left to prove to the crowd, so he is free to spend his strength on the people around him. Submission first. Service follows. The code is the fruit. Islam is the tree.

The Charge

1. Walk into every room asking what needs carrying.

2. Give fairness and stop invoicing for it.

3. Delete your brother's slip from the ledger.

4. Hold one posture with the broke man and the rich man.

5. When blessing comes, pass part of it on. When you get denied, give thanks.

6. Stand between the weak and the powerful when it costs you.

7. Keep your private standard higher than your public one.

8. Break the idol with your face on it.

If this code speaks to something in you, go look at the root it grew from. Read the Quran for yourself and ask your questions. Start here.

The world will keep selling you a statue of yourself. Break it. Then go find what needs carrying.

By Mike Rashid King  •  Allah's Humble Servant