Microcredit pioneer wins Nobel Peace Prize — and puts Episcopalian- and Anglican combatants to shame

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen (”Rural”) Bank just won the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering the concept of "microcredit."  This is where a group of poor people borrows a tiny amount of money to help them finance a small business.  The idea is to help the poor become entrepreneurs and earn their way out of poverty.   Reportedly, Grameen Bank has been extremely successful, making billions of dollars of microloans with an astonishingly-high repayment rate.  Other microcredit initiatives have been modeled on the same basic idea, including that of the Christian group World Vision.

Muhammad Yunus's first name suggests that he's of Muslim origin.  As have other non-Christians, he would seem to exemplify following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law.  (Recall that according to the Gospels, Jesus said that following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law is all we need do to gain eternal life.) 

I suspect many of us Christians would be embarrassed to have our discipleship compared with Yunus's.   The Bible-worshipper minority in the Episcopal Church (TEC) in particular, together with their allies in other churches, should be red-faced with mortification.  These folks have implacably refused to accept the prayerful, duly-enacted decisions of two successive General Conventions on issues of sexuality and the church's relationship with other churches.  They reject even the possibility that the church might be responding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  They seem incapable of trusting that God will help us eventually sort these things out.  Instead, these bibliolaters have forced TEC to devote enormous resources to internecine fighting.  If Jesus was right in his parable about the last judgment, we may all find ourselves wishing we'd devoted those resources instead to initiatives like that of Yunus.

Here's an excerpt from the Associated Press story about Yunus's Nobel Peace Prize:

Yunus told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview that his ''eureka moment'' came while chatting to a shy woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused fingers.

Sufia Begum was a 21-year-old villager and a mother of three when the economics professor met her in 1974 and asked her how much she earned. She replied that she borrowed about 5 taka (nine cents) from a middleman for the bamboo for each stool.

All but two cents of that went back to the lender.

''I thought to myself, my God, for five takas she has become a slave,'' Yunus said in the interview.

''I couldn't understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things,'' he said.

The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman's village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of 856 taka (about $27).

''I couldn't take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves,'' he said, and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.

They all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his spur-of-the-moment generosity grew into a full-fledged business concept that came to fruition with the founding of Grameen Bank in 1983.

In the years since, the bank says it has lent $5.72 billion to more than six million Bangladeshis.

Worldwide, microcredit financing is estimated to have helped some 17 million people.

''Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development,'' the Nobel citation said.

It just goes to show:  Anyone can be a "Christian," no matter what his or her particular beliefs. 

Related postings: 

• Indian Muslims Exemplify the Great Commandment, Providing Tsunami Aid to Hindu Neighbors

• "I hate poor people!"

Comments

[bls]

This is a wonderful story, I agree. God bless Muhammed Yunus.

It's not only church people, I'm afraid, who should be ashamed. Americans in general (maybe all Westerners) seem to be really out of touch with the difficult lives of people elsewhere. We're all living in a bubble here, obsessed with our own silly "problems" - fiddling like Nero while Rome burns. We're self-absorbed aristocrats who aren't even aware of how rich and pampered we are.

Church people have less excuse for this, of course.

[Kiran]

When a person is working toward the greater good of humanity what does it matter what religion he is?

Why are you comparing Prof. Yunn to religious virtues? In essence they are universal virtues and there is no need to put a religious label on it.

It irritates me that Christians feel that "they" should have been the ones to come up with this glorious plan to help end world poverty; it is as if you people have no faith in other beings of different faiths.

I think it is outrageous, unnecessary, and disrespectful to Prof Muhammad Yunn for his plan of social and economic development to be linked to religion.

People of all religions essentially strive for the same common good, so you Christians should not feel like your doing something different or special; and it is not your own soul responsibility.

[D. C.]

Kiran, thanks for commenting. I fear you've misread my posting. I don't claim that Christians "should have been the ones to come up with this glorious plan to help end world poverty." Neither do I link Prof. Yunus's achievements to religion. His name manifestly indicates his Muslim origins, but that's all I've said about it; I've made no claim about his personal religious beliefs, if any. Finally, Christians (or at least most of us) emphatically do not "have no faith in other beings of different faiths" as you say.

My point was simply this: In recent years, Episcopalians and Anglicans have been spending a great deal of time, talent, and treasure on bitter in-fighting about sexuality. How much better if we had devoted those resources to helping address the root causes of poverty, as Professor Yunus (not "Yunn") has so laudably done.

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Kiran says that religious virtues in essence "are universal virtues and there is no need to put a religious label on it." He also says that "[p]eople of all religions essentially strive for the same common good, so you Christians should not feel like your doing something different or special; and it is not your own soul [sic] responsibility."

I have a slightly different view, for a couple of reasons.

First: Labeling a virtue as "religious" usually makes a statement about the people who practice it, not about the virtue itself. If most Christians try to practice a particular virtue most of the time, then we call the virtue a Christian one. If most Hindus, Muslims, and Jews also try to practice the same virtue, then the virtue is likewise a Hindu one and a Muslim one and a Jewish one. (It's not unlike Flickr or del.icio.us allowing you to tag a single picture or a single Web page with multiple tags — doing so doesn't alter the picture or the Web page at all.)

Second: We can hardly speak of "universal" virtues. No matter what virtue you pick, by no means do all people practice it, and hardly anyone practices it all the time.

(In statistical terms, what we call religious virtues do seem to represent the mean for humanity; this may be because on balance, people and groups who behave in ways that we call virtuous seem to have a long-term evolutionary advantage over others. But the behavioral data are scattered all over the place; the standard deviation from the mean is not inconsiderable.)

In any case, Kiran, thanks for taking the time to leave your comment.

[logix]

actually it's a basic fundemental of Islam mentioned in the Quran that the obligation of a Muslim is to help the oppressed, poor, women, and orphans. But of course, some Muslims don't even know the teaching of the Quran as some Christians who dont even know the teaching of the Gospel.

[Anjaan Ahmed]

Hello, Guys please clam down, HINDU, MUSLIM, CHRISTIAN or Others , no matter who you're no matter where you're from, Just beleive that we are Human being, and our Creator , I beleive on "ALLAH" You Beleive on "JESSUS" and others Beleive on "BHOGOBAN" same person diffrent name and way to beleive and pray

Good Bless all

Thank You

Anjaan Ahmed

New York -USA

[templar]

"Muhammad Yunus's first name suggests that he's of Muslim origin. As have other non-Christians, he would seem to exemplify following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law".

I agree on both counts - his name and his evident virtue. But let's not try to infer anything about Islam or his relationship to it just from these facts alone. It would appear that his efforts have faced considerable opposition from the Islamic establishment in Bangladesh. Very sad.

fyi:

http://www.grameen-info.org/mcredit/weapon.html

[Weiwen Ng]

"Anyone can be a "Christian," no matter what his or her particular beliefs. "

Well said!! I am a fan of the artist Br Robert Lentz, who has done a number of Byzantine-style icons with often very unusual subjects. One such subject is Mohandas Gandhi (the icon is available here: http://www.trinitystores.com/main.php4?detail=44&artist=1). Joan Chittister, who co-wrote one book with Lentz, said that it took a Hindu to show the Christians what Christianity was all about.