8 minute read
Are We Educating Muslims or Cowards?
Irving and listening to lectures about the Quran, all while working his corporate job that he eventually ended up despising.
After the market collapsed [on Sept. 29, 2008, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777.68 points], Syed found his way back to Philadelphia in 2010 to coach tennis. Accepting his friend’s invitation to join him on a prophetic tour of Turkey, he found traveling proved to be an eye-opener. He was in deep reflection, visiting prophetic relics around Istanbul.
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As he connected to his religion, Syed realized he had to pursue that which had caused him to feel passion, fulfillment and joy — coaching tennis and benefiting others.
An ambitious Syed finally listened to his peers and “got in line with what God gave him.” He founded Level 7 Tennis Academy in Malvern, about 30 miles west of Philadelphia. Starting out with only two or three kids, membership has now skyrocketed to 600-700 kids. Syed says he never cared if he had two students or 20; he simply put in the work and witnessed God’s bounty.
“[The growth] was overwhelming,” he says. “I don’t have much to do with it — it’s truly from Allah.”
At Level 7 Tennis, Syed tries to instill seven virtues in his players: wisdom, knowledge, courage, industry, courtesy, compassion and contribution. As Syed explains, “[The name of Level 7] is based on the Islamic principle of the seventh heaven being for the people of the highest character and manners.”
He feels that these traits are quite lacking in Muslims today and advises them to look at sports not merely as entertainment, but as a method of personal growth and character building. “I think Muslims can learn a lot from sports. It gave me an incredible work ethic — you cannot be good at anything in life until you have a commitment and a certain amount of consistency. [In that way,] sports can be a spiritual experience as well.”
Syed hopes to produce a number of players better than him, both on the court and off. He wants them to be able to serve the tennis ball and the community.
“I came [to the U.S.] and became a professional tennis player, and it’s my duty to return the favor,” he says. That’s my driving force — that I return what I took from this country.”
The doors of professional tennis opened for Fazal Syed in this land, and he wants to pay it forward for the next kid who shares the same dream he once had.
“It’s [the] connecting of dots, and Allah puts you in this situation when He takes you where He wants to take you,” Syed says. “I wouldn’t do it any other way.” ih
Habeeba Husain is a freelance journalist based in New York. She blogs for Why-Islam and helps manage small Muslim-run businesses WuduGear and Kamani. Her work has also appeared in SLAM Magazine, Narrative.ly and MuslimGirl.com, among other online and print publications.
Are We Educating Muslims or Cowards? Following time-honored traditions is not always a good idea
BY ALIJA IZETBEGOVIĆ*
Alija Izetbegović
Imagine this article as a small conversation with our parents and religious teachers. Not too long ago, I found a close friend of mine, who is a good and excitable Muslim, writing an article about the education of Muslim youth. I read the article. Although it was unfinished, its main ideas were already expressed. Having insisted on education in the spirit of our faith, my friend called upon parents to inculcate in their children the characteristics of goodness, good behavior, humbleness, humility, benevolence, forgiveness, acceptance of fate, patience and so on. He especially warned them to protect their kids from the street, from Western and thriller movies, useless print press and, among other things, sports that stimulate aggressiveness and competition.
The most often used word in my friend’s article, however, was obedience. At home, a child should be obedient to his or her parents, in religious school (maktab) to the imam, in school to the teacher, in the street to the police officer and in the future to his boss, director or superior.
To illustrate this “ideal,” the writer uses an example of a boy who stays away from everything bad, who never fights in the streets, watches Western movies (instead he takes classical piano lessons), plays soccer, has long hair or dates girls (his parents will marry him off “when the time comes”) or yells. His voice is never heard (“as if he is not alive”) and he is grateful and apologetic everywhere he goes.
The writer does not say it, but we can continue: When the boy is wronged, he keeps quiet. When he is hit, he doesn’t return in kind but instead convinces others that “it’s not alright.” In a word, he is one of those who would never so much as “step on an ant.”
While reading this article, I understood fully the meaning of the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Not only that, I think I have grasped one of the causes of our decline in the last few centuries: wrong education/upbringing. In fact, for centuries, as a consequence of misunderstanding original Islamic thought, we have educated our youth wrongly. While the enemy, educated and merciless, subjugated Muslim countries one by one, we taught our youth to be nice, to “not think ill even of a fly,” to accept their fate, be docile and obey every type of rule, for “every rule is from God.”
This sad philosophy of subservience, whose real origin I don’t know but surely originated outside Islam, serves two functions that complement each other perfectly and unhappily: On the one hand, it renders the alive dead; on the other, it highlights wrong ideals in the name of faith. It gathers around the idea of Islam those who have died before they have even started living. It creates insecure people out of normal human creatures, people who are persecuted by the feelings of self-guilt and sin. This philosophy becomes attractive to those failed creatures who run away from reality and seek refuge in passivity and solace.
Only in this way can we explain the fact that even today, during the era of the [Islamic] revival, the very carriers of Islamic thought — or those who claim to be such — keep losing battles at every turn. Their hands tied with the philosophy of prohibitions and dilemmas, these people, who in general have high morals, end up being infe-
rior or unfit in the conflict with less upright and less cultured, but nevertheless resolute and reckless, enemies who know what they want and who don’t care about the means used to achieve their goals.
What could be more normal than for Muslims to be led by leaders who are educated in Islam and inspired by Islamic thought? But they are not being successful due to a simple reason: They have been educated not to lead, but to be led. What could be more natural than for Muslims living in Muslim lands to lead the revolt against the rule of the foreigners and their ideas, their political and economic violence? But they cannot do that, again for a simple reason: They have not been taught to raise their voice, but to obey. We have educated (and gathered) not Muslims but cowards, almost servants. In a world filled with vice, slavery and injustice, teaching young people to abstain, be passive, be obedient — is that not collaborating in the subjugation and oppression of one’s people?
This psychology that we are writing about has several aspects. One of these is the ever-recurring story about the past. Our youth aren’t taught what Islam should be, but what it used to be. They know about the al-Hambra and old conquests, about the city of “The thousand and one Nights,” about the libraries of Samarqand and Cordoba. Their spirit is always oriented toward the glorious past, and so they start living off it. The past is important, of course, but it’s far more useful to repair the worn-out roof of a simple mosque in one’s street than to count all the beautiful mosques built by our illustrious predecessors.
It seems that it would be better to burn all that glorious history if it is becoming a refuge for sighs and for living on memories. It would be better to destroy all those monuments if that is a precondition for finally understanding that we cannot live off the past and that we must do something about our present.
Paradoxically, this fatal pedagogy of subservience and lack of resistance refers to the Quran, despite the fact that at least 50 of its verses mention the principles of struggle and resistance. As a code, the Quran abolished subservience. Instead of subservience to multiple false authorities and majesties, it established only one obedience — to God. In this obedience to God, it built human freedom, the human being’s liberation from all other forms of subservience and fear.
WHAT, THEN, CAN WE ADVISE OUR PARENTS AND TEACHERS?
More than anything else, we can tell them not to kill the energy present in young people. Rather, let them guide and shape our youth. The eunuch they created through their education is not a Muslim, nor is there a way to lead a dead person to Islam. To educate a Muslim, let them educate human beings in the most complete and comprehensive manner possible.
Let the teachers talk to the youth about pride instead of humility, about courage instead of obedience, about justice instead of benevolence. Let them raise a dignified generation of Muslims who will know not to ask for anyone’s permission to live and be what they are. And let us remember that the progress of Islam, just like any other progress, will not come from the docile and the subservient, but from the courageous and the rebellious. ih
[*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Preporod (Renaissance) newspaper, Sarajevo, Bosnia, during October 1971. Alija Izetbegović (1925-2003) went on to become the first president of the Presidency of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-96) and member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996-2000).]
Translated by Ermin Sinanović, PhD, executive director and scholar-in-residence, Center for Islam in the Contemporary World at Shenandoah University.
