Faith & Reason: The truth behind the sad story of the boy with no arms

When we respond to a symbol of suffering we must learn to distinguish between true compassion and a token salving of our conscience

A woman rang me this week from Hamburg to say that she ran a foundation to help disadvantaged children. She wanted to know how she could contact the 12-year-old boy whose photograph appeared in this newspaper this week. It appeared in almost every other paper too. She did not know his name. But he was the boy who had had his arms blown off by a missile which also killed his mother and father. She wanted to try to do something to help.

She, and the rest of the world. The photograph showed him lying in a Baghdad hospital bed, with stumps where his arms should be, and burns across his torso. The expression on his face, depending on which caption-writer you encountered, was a grimace of pain or an uncomprehending stare – though, to me, it seemed all too clear that the poor child had bearing down upon him as much of the enormity of what had happened to him as it was possible for him to comprehend. Behind him, you knew if you'd seen it on television, sat his aunt bathing his head and repeatedly telling him that his parents had gone to heaven. His name, by the way, was Ali Ismaeel Abbas.

Newspapers were inundated with donations and enquiries as to how people could help. One paper raised £20,000 in one day. Another pointed readers in the direction of the Limbless Association. The Maharanee of Jaipur offered to pay his medical fees, anywhere in the world. The Dorset clinic which makes prosthetic limbs for Heather Mills McCartney said it would provide Ali with two artificial arms. Red Cross officials debated whether the boy's interests would be best served by bringing him to Britain.

Something interesting is going on here. We live within overlapping circles of special bonds: family, friends, community, class, co-religionists, party, tribe, race, nation and so on. Our level of compassion is usually in some kind of proportion to these loyalties, as is shown by the cold apophthegm "charity begins at home". The response to this distraught Iraqi child shows we can transcend this. In part this is from the sense we call sympathy. "I immediately thought of my own grandchildren of the same age," one woman wrote to one newspaper.

Yet there is more to compassion than emotion; unlike pity it implies beneficent action: the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us that, and it has its equivalents in most faiths. But it also requires imagination. The war offers another example. Razzaq Kazem al-Khafaj is the man whose wife, six children, mother, father and two brothers were all killed when missiles from US helicopters hit their car near Hilla as they fled their home town of Nasiriyah, in a vain attempt to escape the fighting. Pictures of Razzaq were in most papers too, howling inconsolably and flailing his arms over the rough open coffins which contained the wreckage of his life.

There was no physical symbol of what lay ahead for Razzaq. There would be no struggle with prosthetic limbs, only the loneliness of long, dark, despairing nights. Had he been a Westerner perhaps someone would have written about the psychological scars of multiple bereavement or about the process of counselling which might help him find a way through his dispossession. But to do that we need the moral imagination to see him as a subject, as a master of his own actions. And Razzaq, like Ali, and the countless others like them, are rather treated as objects – objects of our aggression, of our pity, of our compassion, but never really seen as equals. They are people we cannot remember the names of: the boy with no arms, the man with the coffins. There was something of commodification in the well-intentioned judgement on poor little Ali that his was "the most moving image of the war so far". So far.

The religious impulse, by contrast, is to see these people as uniquely valuable individuals, each made in the image of God. Or if we want to take our ethics from Kant we might talk of the moral imperative being to "act so as to treat humanity never only as a means but always also as an end". Or in humanist vocabulary we might talk about basic human dignity. But all lead us to the same place, and the need to distinguish between symbolism and tokenism.

The temptation when we send money to buy new arms for Ali is that psychologically we feel assuaged, as if our compassion blots out some offence. That applies to both those who were anti-war and pro-war at the outset, because both share a complicity in a world which brought us to this point. For the offence is far greater than what has been inflicted on this one child. "I feel ashamed to be an adult," as another correspondent put it in the letter which accompanied his newspaper donation. Whether or not we think the war has been waged for Ali's own good, we know there is no way of communicating that notion to an innocent child whose parents have been taken from him, and with them his limbs and hands. Nor all the other victims.

In all this response there is sympathy, beneficence, and there is also this sense of justice. But in true compassion there is also love – that restless longing for God in the human heart – and the sure knowledge that whatever we offer to Ali must be offered to those who suffer in all those tragedies and outrages that are not thrust before our eyes.

The three charities at work in Iraq already are Cafod (0500 858885), the Red Cross (08705 125 125) and Islamic Relief (0870 444 3132)