At the heart of Yas Mall a huge glass box has appeared. I call it a box, but its dimensions probably make it closer in size to a small room. It makes me think of the author, Roald Dahl, and his great glass elevator. Each of the box's faces are transparent and inside it's littered with money, layer upon layer of 10s, 20s and even the occasional 1,000-dirham note. Around its exterior, tourists clamber to take photos with this unlikely attraction, which is, essentially, a supersized collection box for Ramadan donations.
Generosity is undoubtedly a hallmark of this special time of year. Ramadan is not just about keeping fasts, for many it’s also about giving generously.
Over the past month the press has been filled with stories about donations and philanthropic deeds, from the Al Maktoum Foundation’s iftar project, which aimed to benefit the needy across a host of African nations, to the Oasis Water and Dubai Cares initiative, which aimed to provide clean drinking water to 10,000 children in developing countries.
Many column inches have also been devoted to Prince Alwaleed’s pledge to make a philanthropic donation of his entire $32 billion fortune over the coming years. With no desire to “make windows into the souls of men”, I tend to accept generosity at face value. However, there are undoubtedly times when apparent generosity is little more than an exercise in marketing and public relations.
For example, when a commercial entity goes out of its way to wish me “Ramadan kareem” and then bombards me with product offers.
Worse still, is when an entity wishes me “Ramadan kareem” in glorious Technicolor neon, while simultaneously inflating prices.
Surely, true generosity is a dish best served in silence, and anonymous generosity exorcises the demons of self-interest and self-promotion.
But of course, there are those who legitimately make a song and dance out of their charitable acts, because they hope that by doing so they will inspire others to give generously too, or at least draw attention to the cause.
Seeing all that cash in the supersized-donation box in Yas Mall is a reminder of other people’s generosity and it moves us to act in similar ways. Upon viewing the great glass box with its currency based carpet, my own young daughters demanded cash from me so they too could participate in this public display of philanthropy.
Nowadays we tend to see charity as a great human virtue, but even the much-maligned rat is capable of selfless acts.
There is a classic psychology experiment from 1959, published in the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, which demonstrates this case. Ten lab rats were trained to obtain food by pressing one of two levers. Lever 1 was difficult to press, and produced only a little food, whereas lever 2 was easy and resulted in lots of food.
However, when the rats pressed lever 2, the “evil scientist” had rigged it so that a rat in a neighbouring cage got a painful electric shock. Once the rats realised that lever 2 was causing their neighbour’s distress, eight out of 10 of them switched back to lever 1: harder work for less food, but it spared their rodent neighbour further shocks.
The basic nature of charity is described by Saadi of Shiraz, a 13th century poet, who wrote: “You who are unmoved by the suffering of others are not entitled to the name of man.”
I guess there will always be an invisible line between selfless acts of kindness and calculated generosity. Some of us could even learn a little from the charity of rats.
Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas