This morning, on the way to school, I got into an argument with our daughter about the choices we make. Well, a semi-argument. I was putting my points across calmly and rationally; only she was raging against my nonsense. My contention: that ethical choices apply as much in hard times as in good.

It began with her pleading me to put in an order from Amazon. I told her she could buy the identical item locally, so that’s what we would do. I said it was a waste of the delivery driver’s time coming all this way just to deliver an item we could get in nearby shops. She said that’s their job; if they didn’t like it, they’d work somewhere else. I said you don’t choose your job; your job chooses you.

Anyway, I said, it’s not about delivery. It’s about supporting local businesses in hard times. And about peeling them away from screens, be it the computer or the television, to actually get out and see the non-virtual world. Go to town, visit a real shop, have a look at the item in person, carry it over to the till and pay for it. And if you’re lucky, dad will buy you a hot chocolate with cream on top while we’re at it.

I had the same discussion with my wife recently, when she expressed reluctance to eat out as a family. “We shouldn’t be extravagant,” she said, “when people are really struggling out there.” I look at it differently. If those that have money stop visiting cafes and restaurants, and stop spending, then the situation’s only going to get worse. Then someone who had a job will be out of work, and will likely be more dependent on food banks and emergency support.

In the end, they will likely end up having to get a job at Amazon, driving a van for deliveries, or fulfilling orders in a warehouse, foot soldiers of the global conglomerate, that very modern version of the British East India Company. A wage, we’d say. Yes sure, but not exactly a life. These are the hard choices we have to make in hard times.

Believe me, I’ve been though hard times myself, in the early 2000s when I couldn’t get a settled wage. It’s tough and humiliating. Now’s the time for compassion and virtuous action, not dog-eat-dog. Best to look beyond government propaganda blaming the most vulnerable for the problems of the nation as a mask for their own stupendous corruption. Hard times demand hard ethical choices.

It’s best to maintain financial independence from your wider family. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t support your kin when they’re in need, or that you should build walls between you. But it’s best to separate your concerns, and live self-contained lives if you can.

The alternative is the scenario I have encountered repeatedly: younger siblings left destitute by the eldest brother, with spiralling debts, creditors chasing, bailiffs seizing assets. It’s not necessarily that they set out with bad intentions, greedily hoarding wealth. It’s more that when hard times hit, desperation and fear causes people to act irrationally.

Brothers who worked together in the good times, developing the business left to them by their father, quickly forget those genetic bonds when their way of life is threatened. In a recession or cost of living crisis, the pressures are multiplied.

It’s not just your business that is struggling, but all your customers and clients too. You are reliant on them paying their bills, but they are also reliant on theirs. Meanwhile, the other way up the chain, you have mounting bills to pay. It’s a snowball, out of your control.

Something’s going to break, and unfortunately most vulnerable are your relationships. Big brother, usually managing partner in the enterprise through the good times, now has to put himself, his wife and his children first. He has to protect the family home. He has standards to maintain.

Thus do pooled family assets become his property alone. Shared investments are cashed in to cover his debts. Side businesses are sold on. Assets are sold off. And soon enough there will be a court case, disputing shares of inheritance going back years. If he plays it right, the eldest brother will emerge financially independent.

But his siblings? Mostly they face financial ruin. Some fear prison. Some lose the family home. Others, with creditors still chasing, contemplate suicide as the only way out. It’s not that they owe a couple of hundred, which might easily be paid off by a charitable relative. Their debts are in the millions, and those they owe money to have debts of millions too.

The growing conflicts seeded by these strains affects the entire family. The stresses cause physical and mental illness amongst parents, spouses, children. Hypertension and heart conditions become commonplace. Depression and anxiety multiplies. Conflict grows and grows.

The widowed mother is forced to take sides in the dispute, and will feel pressured to stand with her eldest son fearing that she will be left alone in old age. But in doing so, she alienates her other children, distraught that she stood with the unjust party, and now she has an anguish that will probably never heal, her face just one big perpetual frown.

Here a conflict that will probably never cease or heal. Here, relationships throughly broken, beyond repair. There is no way out, except through humility and forgiveness. But that requires a faith and generosity of spirit which will have been severely tried by now. These the trials and tribulations of life.

Having witnessed such a scenario repeatedly, I’m so grateful that as a family we live independent lives, each of us responsible for our own affairs alone. Those who live in tight-knit extended families may consider this a selfish declaration, but it is a view borne of those multigenerational conflicts repeatedly witnessed all around me.

Better to be able to give willingly, in charity alone, being good to others with sound intentions, purely for the love of it. Wealth is a great trial. Certainly, man is in his love of wealth intense. “Every nation has its trial,” as the prophet is reported to have said, “and the trial of my nation is wealth.”

Eating meat regularly and in large quantities is really a modern phenomenon. If I go to stay in my wife’s village back home, their ordinary diet mostly comprises corn, cabbage and beans. From time to time in winter, if there are guests, someone might bring home a bag of hamsi (anchovy), but meat is a rarity. That was also my experience in rural Tanzania twenty-five years ago, where our daily diet consisted of beans and rice alone.

Our modern predilection for consuming meat for every meal would be considered very strange by the generations that came before us. Traditionally, in many Muslim societies, the only time the common people would eat meat would be once a year around Eid al-Adha, when the wealthy slaughter an animal to distribute amongst the poor. For the poorest families, this remains true to this day.

In contemporary Muslim cultures, however, consuming meat has almost been turned into an obligation, as evidenced by the proliferation of Muslim-owned fried chicken shops and burger bars on every high street. This culture can be troubling for some of those attracted to the faith by its ethical dimensions.

One convert friend has commendably managed to maintain his vegetarianism amongst Muslims for over forty years, but most would struggle to maintain that stance. Certainly, my own insistence on eating less meat after visiting an abattoir only lasted a few months before we drifted back towards its consumption. Early on, we would address that discomfort by purchasing meat only from a smallholder, whom we knew to take animal welfare seriously. Theirs, meat that could truly be considered both halal and tayib.

Then eat of what God has provided for you which is lawful and good. And be grateful for the favour of God, if it is Him that you worship.

Quran 16:114

Unfortunately, through the years since then, we have reverted to form, falling under the intoxicating spell of its taste. I think this is forgetfulness more than anything. It is difficult to remain cognisant of the ethical dimensions of faith at all times, especially if you’re wandering amongst those who don’t consider ethics that important at all.

Perhaps, for that reason, it’s a good idea to spend time amongst the older generation, or spend time in rural backwaters, or simply move amidst vegetarians. Certainly, while socialising with colleagues or visiting family, we find ourselves more than capable of turning vegetarian to avoid consuming haram foods. In a way, I wish that in my early days as a Muslim I had simply told others that I had become vegetarian to avoid all the strife that my faith identity brought.

The consumption of meat has been made permissible for us. But as every learned Muslim knows, conditions apply. The prophetic sunna bears no resemblance to modern industrial meat production, devoid of moderation or compassion. The prophetic way entails dealing with each animal as an individual, treating it well during its lifetime and with kindness at life’s end. And as I write this, I am jolted back to reality once more, recalling how far short we fall of those ideals.

Surely the time has come to take stock of our habits, reminding ourselves once more of the ethical dimensions of our faith, which so easily slip from our minds. These the conversations we must have with each other, whenever we realise that our standards have slipped.

A surge in childhood diseases, resulting in premature death? Shocked? Not particularly. Some (wholly-unqualified) observations:

First: it’s difficult to get a GP appointment these days. Often, adult patients will first be offered a telephone consultation, some days away. If your symptoms are deemed worrying, you may then be invited to an in-person consultation. Timely access to medical care is vital.

Second: many GP practices have outsourced their telephone triage systems to a single nationwide service provider. This may have resulted in some kind of cost-saving, presumably cutting receptionist salaries on site. However, last week, that service was unavailable nationally due to a server fault, leaving patients unable to contact their local surgery.

Third: the established electronic patient record used by the NHS 111 service has been unavailable since August, after the platform provider was hit by a cyber attack. Contingencies have had to be put in place instead, some more effective than others. If call responders and on-call clinicians cannot easily access medical records, it is a problem for patient care.

Forth: though you wouldn’t know this listening to the government and media’s obsession with the so-called migrant crisis (the increase in numbers very obviously having more to do with refugee crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan, than channel crossings), the health service is in crisis. Many NHS trusts are facing acute staffing shortages. This impacts patient care.

Fifth: lockdowns during the pandemic may have impacted the development of children’s natural immunity, in as much as they were exposed to fewer bugs over a period of two years. But I suspect the jury is out on this one.

My grandmother used to tell me that for the whole of his career, my Methodist grandfather was derided by his colleagues for not drinking, smoking or gambling. His ethos was to live within his means and not squander the wealth he earned.

I am sure he would be shocked if he were alive today learning that the average UK household nowadays spends over £900 on alcohol annually. As a non-drinker for 25 years, for me that equates to a saving of over £20,000 to date.

Similarly, the average smoker spends nearly £5,000 on cigarettes per year, amounting to £125,000 over the same period. Then there’s the lottery, on which the average player spends over £400 annually, amounting to £10,000 over a quarter of a century.

There has certainly been barakah in my grandfather’s wisdom. Having followed a similar pattern in my own life, I strangely find myself in a comfortable situation, despite modest means. Although we are a single-income household, we have managed to live debt-free for some years now.

Quite deliberately, we do not possess credit cards, which might tempt us to buy what we cannot afford. We do not have financing deals to pay for a nice new car, choosing to buy a secondhand vehicle we could afford outright instead. We don’t have the latest smartphones either.

To me, it is shocking that the average personal debt in the UK currently stands at over £25,000. But then I suppose it is not so surprising if we consider what we chose to forgo to achieve a debt-free existence. For sure, I don’t enjoy a standard of living anything like my upbringing, but everything is relative.

I am not under any illusion as to how hard life is for so many, however. In the past, we made the mistake of agreeing to be guarantors for a friend’s tenancy, and ended up having to pay off significant rent arrears on their behalf. Likewise, we’ve had to write off many loans to others when it became apparent they could not repay them. We know life is tough when you have money worries.

For sure, we don’t know what tomorrow holds, but we can at least tie our camel, so to speak. In other words, you do what you can to achieve stability in your life. I can say that though I made a mess of my foundations in my youth, repairs such as these helped me get back on track. With God’s help we have been able to live within our means ourselves. Alhamdulilah for that.

We often feel legitimately aggrieved by the imprecision of language when others associate the whole with the actions of the few. When newspapers seem to associate all Muslims with the actions an extremist fringe, we rightly decry such inaccuracies, if not as plain deception. We would think then that we would be alert to that imprecision for others too. Ah, but not so.

How often do we hear the phrase “Hindu chauvinism” used across the press, unchallenged? Our own Spidey-Sense shoots into overdrive when serious commentators deploy a similar phrase referencing our religion while discussing the behaviour of ruling political movements, but for the unholy other we stay the course, unthinkingly regurgitating those mantras without pause.

So it is that we speak of Hindu extremism, nationalism and chauvinism without making any attempt to clarify that people identifying as Hindu are as diverse as any other group, crossing the full political spectrum, belonging to different ethnicities and social classes, and holding to different religious worldviews. If we are in fact referring to the actions of adherents to the political ideology, Hindutva, we should be precise.

Hindutva is a right-wing supremacist ideology, inspired by the European political-philosophy which underpinned twentieth-century fascism. It is as much associated with the heterodox traditions of Hinduism as Zionism is with Judaism or Hizb ut-Tahir with Islam. It represents neither majoritarianism nor communalism, only a divisive supremacism, which is at odds with the diverse systems of thought and belief which actually characterise the Indian subcontinent.

To speak of Hindu chauvinism would be the same as speaking of Christian or Muslim chauvinism: it is meaningless, for adherents to our different traditions are disparate. On the political spectrum, we reflect both left and right, libertarianism and authoritarianism. In our personal interactions, some are merciful and kind, while others are brutal and intolerant. In religious practice, some are puritanical literalists, while others embrace inclusive syncretism. Some embrace multiple identities and traditions, while others hold to a narrow fundamentalism.

For some, the term Hindu has no religious connotation whatsoever, but is instead a cultural or geographical marker alone. But that is as much true of others. Many Muslims, Christians and Jews might self-identify with these labels, despite neither believing in nor practising the associated faith. Some of the same would assert that converts are not and cannot truly be associated with that identity from a sociological perspective. In other words, these markers of identity are complex, defying the simplistic explanations beloved of commentators and activists everywhere.

For sure, I have more in common politically with my old friend from university, a third-generation Bharatanatyam artist, than with many of my brethren nominally associated with me by faith. In our uncompromising monotheism, I may be inseparable from another Muslim, but in my views on patriarchy and diversity it might be impossible to be further apart. Amongst the Muslims, we find some who would feel politically at home with Jeremy Corbyn, and yet others who would promote a Muslim equivalent of the BJP.

So precision please. Consider that Quranic maxim as guidance: “And do not mix the truth with falsehood or conceal the truth while you know it.” Or even: “Do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just.” The alternative may lead us to a very dark place. Don’t alienate your allies by failing to differentiate between friend and foe, nor let others play the game of divide and conquer once more. Be precise, and wise.

Where am I from? I am from dust, and will return to dust. And then I will be raised alive when all are raised alive. In that epoch, we will at last know our final destination. Until then, we are all travellers on the road of life. If you are settled, you have missed the point.

Listen to the beautiful poetic music of the maghreb. Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, you will hear their humanity.

The people of the boats have dreams and aspirations too. They are humans, with hearts, who love and cry like you.

There are no illegal humans. All humans have the right to life and dignity. The earth has been made wide and spacious by the Lord of all creation.

My wife and I were discussing this question, for it’s been in the news. As an outsider, from elsewhere, she felt such a question is just smalltalk, designed to break the ice, coming after the obligatory comments about the weather and, “Did you watch the match last night?”

But perhaps her response is based upon the different contexts in which we find ourselves: the difference between connecting and otherising. In Turkey, it would be considered perfectly normal for one person to ask another, “Are you Las, Georgian or Hamşen?” each being one of many local ethnicities that might be suggested by accent or dialect. As for me, if I replied that I am English, they would immediately guffaw, “David Beckham!”

I could confirm that such smalltalk is just as common here. At university, “Where are you from?” was a standard icebreaker whenever meeting someone new. In my case, I’d reply, “near York.” New York?! Wow, that’s amazing. “No, no, not New York, near York.” Oh, oh, right, that’s er, not nearly as interesting. At work, too, colleagues will ask exactly the same question because of my subtle northern twang.

But that’s obviously not the context in which this question was asked of the founder of the charity Sistah Space at Buckingham Palace, wherein the line of questions was interpreted more as an interrogation than as friendly conversation. Indeed, it reportedly ended with hostile words in a condescending tone, which made the guest feel very uncomfortable.

Many will relate to that, feeling this line of questioning is less about taking an interest in an individual’s lineage or heritage, and much more about making them feel like an outsider who does not belong. In some ways, I could relate to either position.

In my nearly twenty-five years wandering amongst Muslim communities, I have been asked this question repeatedly. Often those asking are elderly folk, whom I presume to be genuinely curious to work out where I am from, given that I look a little different to the majority of congregations.

If I am out of area, I will first name the town I live in. If they then respond, “No, originally?” I will say that I’m originally from Hull. If they then say, “No, no, originally, originally,” my response will depend on whether I like the person or not. If I feel they’re being an idiot, I’ll simply reply, “Water.” Otherwise, I’ll just describe myself as a restless native, a quarter Irish.

This will satisfy all but the most stubborn of folk. The latter are the type who will go on to persuade me that I’m actually Syrian or Bosnian. You can’t do much about these types. But as for the rest, I think I’d agree with my beloved: yes, it is just friendly small talk, designed to break the ice. For sure, I’d rather this question than some awkward discussion about football.

But I am a white male, whose belonging is never questioned, so this is easy for me to say. My wife, although her skin is more or less the same colour as mine, is occasionally reminded that she is from somewhere else, either as a result of her accent, because she was overheard speaking a different language, or due her dress. But others, more visibly distinct, find themselves reminded of their otherness constantly. For such folk, I can imagine these persistent questions really grate.

So if you must ask, do so carefully. If a person indicates that they think it none of your business, respect that. If, on the other hand, they’re proud of their long lineage, prepare to be bamboozled. Beware, especially, of those who were given a DNA testing kit for Christmas. You may need to grab a chair for the answer to that particular question.