Marwa Yousuf K.
“So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.” — Qur’ān 99:7–8
The verse is small in its scale, almost hushed, yet it unsettles everything. An atom’s weight – so slight the fingers cannot feel it, so tiny the eyes cannot see it – placed on the scales of eternity. And suddenly, the economy of the world is inverted. If this were divine accounting, then the centre of political economy is not only where numbers shout in billions but where life is kept going by grams and gestures. This piece is about those grams and gestures: how they confound capital’s measurements and outlive war’s arithmetic, and why a Muslim lens sees them not as sentimental trivia but as the hard ground of justice.
Scale as Distortion, Scale as Discipline
Capital speaks in indices, trade balances, debt service ratios; war speaks in maps, payloads, casualty tallies. Both have their place, but both carry a built-in vanity: the assumption that what is large is what is real. That vanity is dangerous, because it trains the eye away from the sites where human life is actually negotiated – kitchens, courtyards, schoolrooms, prayer mats, clinic queues.
The language of enormity leaves no space for the fragile. A bruised tomato is invisible, a toy repaired again is ridiculous, and an old coat is irrelevant. But tell that to the child who eats that tomato, tell that to the baby who sleeps clutching that toy, tell that to the man warmed by that coat in the cold of curfew. The world may dismiss these things as negligible, but the oppressed know they are decisive.
A more honest discipline is to read the scale both ways. The macro can tell you about oil flows and interest rates; the micro tells you whether a neighbourhood can cook when the grid goes down, whether a school can still educate with low funding, and whether a clinic can keep insulin cold when diesel is rationed. These are not “soft” questions. They are the load-bearing ones.
The Qurʾān emphasizes this dual perspective. It condemns those who “give short measure” and “defraud the balance,” and commands: “establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance.” (55:9) The warning is bigger than a marketplace sin; it is a political ethic. If your policy inflates GDP and restricts access to bread, if it builds towers and cuts school libraries, the scales are crooked, no matter how impressive the graphs.
Survival as Craft, not Spectacle
In Palestine, people call the discipline of staying rooted ṣumūd: lessons taught beneath drones, seeds planted where bulldozers may return, loaves baked when shops go dark. The power lies less in the image than in the craft – the habits that let you keep living tomorrow.
In Kashmir, winter survival is an assembled knowledge. Noon chai brewed on a samovar when the electricity cuts for the fifth time; a kangir tucked beneath a pheran to keep the body warm under curfew; khatamband ceilings repaired slat by slat so a room still feels like a room; walnut wood carved and paper painted in naqāshī even when the market wobbles. There is nothing picturesque about it. It is competence- labour that turns scarcity into continuity.
In refugee camps and irregular hostels that share the same weather of precarity, survival looks like a tarp retied before a storm, a hand-written rota for charging phones from a single generator, a public notice with bus timings and safe routes, a midwife’s kit packed to move quickly. Among the undocumented in cities that pretend not to see them, it is a photocopy hidden flat in a shoe, a neighbour’s knock that warns of a raid, a small cash pot labelled with a child’s name.
Frantz Fanon wrote that “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.” The mission begins small: to preserve memory, to maintain warmth, and to foster learning that moves from today to tomorrow. You cannot fight for a horizon if you cannot keep a household alive for the next twenty-four hours. The spectacle of resistance is easy; the craft is the work.
Value: Use Over Illusion
Marx provided us with a vocabulary to explain why small things can become decisive under pressure: the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. The market teaches us to see price, not use. Siege and austerity tear that spell. What matters is not what a commodity fetches in a distant market but what it does where you stand: does it feed, warm, heal, connect, console.
Lenin’s old instruction. Concrete analysis of concrete conditions becomes beautifully literal here. The concrete conditions are whether the gas cylinder lasts the month, whether public transport still operates, whether the water supply is drinkable, and whether the clinic opens at dawn. Metrics that cannot answer these questions are not neutral; they are evasions.
The Qurʾān binds this realism to an ethic: “indeed, Allāh commands justice, excellence, and generosity to relatives, and forbids immorality, wrongdoing, and transgression.” (16:90). Justice (ʿadl) is not a mood; it is a measurable practice. Excellence (iḥsān) is not a flourish; it is doing the ordinary as if it mattered to Allāh – because it does.
The Politics of Maintenance
The spectacle loves the new; the oppressed keep the world going by maintaining what exists. Maintenance is political because breakdown is profitable for some and deadly for others. A hinge oiled so a door will not announce itself to the police is politics. A stairwell light is installed to prevent a grandmother from falling. A neighbourhood fridge used as a communal space for leftovers is a form of politics.
Care and repair are Muslim grammar put to work: amānah (trust) as the duty to keep entrusted things in good order; raḥmah (mercy) as the reflex to ease another’s daily frictions; ʿadl as the refusal to shift costs downward onto the already burdened. Rasūlullāh صلى الله عليه وسلم taught that removing harm from a path is charity, that a sincere smile is charity, and that the best of people are those most beneficial to people. This is not a romance of smallness. It is a map: where benefit passes quietly from hand to hand, that is where politics is honest.
Consider three common maintenance fronts:
● Time. Checkpoints steal it, shift work fractures it, platforms harvest it. Reclaiming time is a form of resistance: a schedule that protects the hour of study, a collective that shares childcare so someone can attend a clinic, or a rule in a workplace that bans after-hours messages.
● Tools. Needles, pressure cookers, bicycle repair kits, water filters, thermoses, and power banks. These are banal until they are not. A municipal budget that funds tool libraries pays back in stability more than a vanity project ever will.
● Thresholds. Entrances and exits are where fear tends to gather. Lighting, locks, ramps, signage in familiar languages, a volunteer at a clinic door – these convert thresholds from sites of stress into sites of welcome. The cost is small; the yield is human.
The Digital Small and The Shadow Networks
The small now travels on circuits. A PDF textbook that moves through a class chat; a mesh router set up during a blackout so a clinic can message a midwife; an SD card with scans of documents and photographs; a community spreadsheet listing pharmacies that still stock insulin; a signal group broadcasting safe streets during a protest; a USB key that carries a portfolio across borders.
Big Tech sells scale and surveillance. Communities improvise service. The metric is moral and straightforward: does this connection reduce hunger, fear, ignorance, and isolation? If yes, it belongs to the economy of small things. If not, it belongs to the other side, no matter how sleek the interface.
The sūrah named al-māʿūn “the small kindnesses” is the perfect digital charter: it condemns those who perform piety while withholding ordinary aid. A politics that pronounces the correct slogans and starves the infrastructure of daily life is precisely what the sūrah warns about.
Law, Truce, Development: A Test That Does Not Lie
This is not necessarily an argument against law or policy; that is discourse for another time. Truce, I believe, is an audit tool. Any ceasefire that does not open the road for food and medicine is merely a show. Any anti-poverty programme that cannot raise the hours of light in a poor home is branding. Any “security” plan that forces mothers to plait children’s hair in the dark to avoid stray bullets is failure spelled on a child’s scalp.
So test policies where they cannot pretend: can kettles boil, can clinic fridges hold vaccines, can public taps run, can schools mark attendance safely, can names be taught without fear. Run this audit at every altitude – municipal, provincial, national, international. The questions are not naïve; they are non-negotiable.
Defence of The Near
Malcolm X said it cleanly: we are non-violent with those who are non-violent with us; we are not non-violent with those who are violent with us. The principle scales down to the near – the bread on the table, the integrity of a room, the unmolested sleep of a child. This is not a call to romanticise conflict; it is a refusal to accept that defence begins only at borders and budgets. For a Muslim ethic, protection of the near is ʿibādah: guarding what Allāh trusts you with, starting with the closest circle.
A Muslim Civic of The Everyday
What does this demand of those of us who are not under bombardment yet live inside the same world?
● Give to reduce friction. Direct support to kitchens, school libraries, charging stations, internet cooperatives, sewing circles, transport vouchers, and clinic funds. If a donation does not lower someone’s daily drag, find one that does. Prefer zakāh and ṣadaqah channels that can show concrete reductions in hunger, cold, distance, and isolation.
● Organise for maintenance. Neighbourhood tool libraries, time banks, volunteer repair days, childcare swaps, “keep-the-lights-on” funds for clinics and shelters. The glamour is low, the payoff is huge.
● Boycott what destroys the small. Name the firms and policies that monetise breakdown, sell surveillance to police the poor, or lock basic goods behind predatory pricing. This is not identity performance; it is material leverage.
● Write and legislate from ground level. Journalists: photograph hinges oiled and lamps lit, not only smoke and sirens. Legislators: budget for the infrastructure of the ordinary before monuments to leadership. Administrators: measure success in hours of light, pages read, rooms warmed, routes made safe. Imams and teachers: preach iḥsānas competent care, not only as a mood.
● Rasulullahصلى الله عليه وسلم said: “save yourselves from the fire, even if with half a date.” (Bukhari, Muslim).
Half a date: small, laughable to the world, yet world-altering before Allāh. Islamic consciousness teaches us that scale deceives. What matters is the atom, the half-date, the unseen act that tips the balance of justice.
Histories Carried Forward
The economy of small things is not a new concept. Enslaved people kept songs and recipes alive that empires could not catalogue. Miners built mutual aid halls when companies would not insure them. Women in war mended, taught, budgeted, smuggled, buried, birthed, and kept archives – often without names on statues. These are not footnotes to history; they are the muscle. Revolutions that forget them do not survive themselves.
Lenin’s warning applies here too: begin from the real, not from illusions. If a movement cannot feed children and keep them warm while it remakes the world, it will become cruel in victory. If a state cannot maintain clinics stocked and streets safe while pursuing growth, it will be just another manager of managed misery.
Back to The Scale
Empire worships the large and glorifies enormity: skyscrapers, weapons, armies, markets. But the Muslim consciousness, and any honest revolutionary consciousness, returns to the unit that matters. We are taught to weigh the fragile with the gravity it deserves. To understand that survival itself ~ even in its smallest gestures, is victory.
The test is simple and it does not lie: after your decision, can the kettle boil? Can the child read? Can the clinic store insulin? Can the elder sleep warm? Can the neighbourhood remember its names aloud? If yes, the balance is closer to justice. If not, return to the scale.
“And establish weight in justice, and do not make deficient the balance.” The scales are nearer to our hands than we think. Place something on them today, tomorrow, and the day after – not as performance, but as a way of keeping the world.
The economy of small things reminds us that annihilation is never total; that even in the face of overwhelming machinery, what slips through the cracks carries the pulse of another world. The bruised tomato, the toy, the coat: each is a testimony that life remains, and that empire has not won.
Marwa Yousuf K. is a writer exploring how politics and faith shape life in Occupied Kashmir and beyond, with contributions to local publications and community platforms.
