A New Road Map: Tawhid in the 21st century
And your Allah is One Allah. There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful (Q2:163).Archive for youth
9/11 Commission Report: Youth Education Recommendations
Some recommendations that the American Muslim community should proactively consider for the short and long term future include:
* Reform of part-time and full-time Muslim school curricula as needed.
This would require a thorough review of the curricula of these institutions. Some would need to de-emphasize certain scholars and ideologies that have the potential to incite hatred. This is not to say that they should be eliminated from curricula, however it is important to have guided instruction and a balanced expression of views. As a profound Muslim thinker teaches, we need to teach people to swim, not prevent them from approaching the ocean.
One issue that we need to consider is the importance of emphasizing ideas and concepts rather than relying almost exclusively on the renown of the author to validate the merit of the content.
* Reform of popular Muslim publications.
The care that needs to define the content of school curricula should also be placed on the editing and publication of the multitude of popular community magazines that exist today. Once again, censorship should never be the tolerated, however the current emphasis on certain scholars rather than on ideas needs to be mitigated.
* Khutbahs, halaqas and MSA events.
Long-term strategies need to be developed at local and national levels that would work towards consistently developing the character, minds and mission of the youth. The current ad-hoc nature of planning results in lost opportunities.
* National resources.
The importing of foreign-born “scholars” or the exporting of our youth to different countries to learn Islam and the Arabic language should be strongly discouraged. The training of the next generation of leaders, imams and citizens needs to happen within the country to ensure that American Muslims do not lose touch with the American aspect of their identity, while maintaining their connection to the sources of their Muslim identity: the Quran and the Sunnah.
The reform of youth education is something that will be done for us if we do not take the initiative ourselves. As American Muslims it is our responsibility to define our own path. A strategic path enabling our own development is a necessity in the context of the scenarios that can play out. The cultivation of a healthy mind needs time and planning; in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it.”
9/11 Commission Report: Youth Education
Youth Education: A Portent for Our Future
Madrasahs around the globe need reform. There is nary a soul that would disagree with the statement, including their own administrators. Presumably these are the hotspots that teach hatred by indoctrinating their students with teachings from the Quran and scholars labeled extremists like Sayyid Qutb, Ibn Taymiyya and Mawdudi. Their graduates are vilified as having learned no marketable skills and thus are assumed to emerge as frustrated, unemployed youth, prime for the picking of malicious terrorists.
The 9/11 Commission considers the solution to this dilemma to be the opening of primary and secondary schools around the world where the syllabus will be less religious, more secular and thereby safer. We can agree or disagree on the effectiveness of such an endeavor. We can argue the merits of internal reform versus imposed external change. We can debate the acceptance of such policy by various regimes that will be the recipients. What we should not do as an American Muslim community is be complacent and think that such reforms are not setting the precedent for possible future action against our own local Islamic schools.
As any futurist or scenario-planner will tell you, scenarios outline expected or supposed sequences of events. It is no stretch of the imagination to consider that the 9/11 Commission Report’s criticism of schools teaching the Quran in other parts of the world and the labeling of scholars as ‘extremist’ will eventually also be leveled against schools on our home-ground. After all, every Muslim school whether full-time or part-time teaches the Quran; several teach the works of these same scholars. Every MSA event alludes to the same scholars, and even almost every edition of Islamic Horizons does too.
As Muslims, we often protest that extremists quoting Qutb or defining Islam as violent and militant are misinterpreting the texts. At the same time, we proclaim the need to defend Islam and its intellectuals from the attacks of the nefarious “West.”
Strategies are devised to enable people to achieve their objectives within the context of scenarios. What we need to clarify within our community is our objective. National security should be just as much a concern for us as it is for our neighbor across the street. The development of our youth should be of paramount importance for us.
The question we must answer honestly pertains to the priority we give to the development of the character of our youth. Is it truly important or is this merely lip-service? Censorship is not an option, but guided instruction should be. While we all agree that Qutb was an extraordinary activist, we also know that he hated the West. When we give a young, impressionable mind a book written by an author that lashes out against the West we forget that the young mind reading the book is also part of the West. We inadvertently teach our youth to hate themselves.
We do not teach the youth to be close to the Quran and the Sunnah– instead we encourage them to read other peoples interpretations of both. Enabling the child to read revelation directly is not dangerous. What is dangerous is for them to read politically motivated interpretations that were written for a different country, for a different people and for a different time-period.
We need to work towards building the character of our youth and simultaneously prevent the exploitation of vulnerable personalities within our own community. If we fail to do so and are targeted as a result, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
It is easy to don a cloak of paranoia and assume that the Administration is out to get us. What is more productive is to understand that as American Muslims we have a responsibility to fulfill. This includes ensuring the development of our own community in a healthy and productive manner–at peace with the duality of its identity and clear about its mission.
