Surviving is Thriving (1)

How America became a sad and lonely place

With Ramadan behind us, I’m going to post weekly on Sundays. The new schedule starts something new too; instead of sharing what I’m teaching, I’ll be explaining why I’m teaching. Like anyone else, I only have so much time—and the same goes for the kids, too. So how do I decide what to focus on? What gets more attention and what gets less?

By pushing myself to write out my approach, of course I hope to improve my teaching. I also hope to help you reflect on your teaching. Because if we teach without understanding what we’re trying to convey—and, just as importantly, how—we might put in a lot of time, spend a lot of resources, and burn through a lot of energy, but nevertheless get nowhere.

Today’s post is the first in a series.

Introducing The Middle School Boys’ Halaqa

During warmer months, the boys meet weekly for 90 minutes. The first third of that is what you might think of when you hear “halaqa”: They walk in, check their phones, and we discuss a topic (say, the adab of Muslim men). The second third of the halaqa is food. They have to eat! But the final third? I let them loose (with supervision, of course.) On the nicest days, they’re outside, playing basketball or football.

Why not spend more of the time learning? Well, for one, it’s hard to get anyone at the end of the day to sit in place. But they shouldn’t have to sit in place. They’re kids, after all (the same holds for teenagers, who get enough of that for school.) More importantly, early on in the halaqa, I knew I wanted them to also develop community, that togetherness is part of faith.

I can only do so much. We, as parents, can only do so much. It’s the friends they have, the peers they choose to spend time with, the ones they will turn to in difficult moments, who will have an outsize influence on them. We, as parents, and the overarching community, can make that easier or harder. Except, over time, I realized there was another problem. It’s one thing to be looking for community.

It’s another thing not to know how to be in community. The world these kids are growing up in pressures them to be isolated, to take the dopamine hits from phones that destroy their attention, focus, and, yes, even adab, and for no apparent reward. They lose years when their minds are sponges; when they should even just be learning how to be with different kinds of people, they’re isolated.

Is that good for them? I doubt it. Modern America has gone down this road, and it hardly looks promising. Before you ask what you should teach your kids, ask: What are you teaching against?

Every Picture Needs A Frame

A few months ago, I had to be downtown on a Friday, which meant instead of attending the Islamic Center of Mason or the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, Clifton Mosque was the better option. I’m so glad for that. That day’s khutbah (sermon) was one of the most meaningful and thoughtful I’d heard in a long time, with the khateeb (preacher) making, elaborating on, and returning to a vital insight.

We live in a culture, he argued, that would have us believe we must choose between ourselves and those around us. If we don’t put ourselves first, he said, we supposedly lose the chance to follow our dreams and reach out potential. But if we put ourselves first, what’s to say we aren’t being selfish, even narcissistic? Modern culture loves to pit the individual against the group, framing this as the central drama of our lives.

It’s not surprising that our politics echoes that trope.

Sometimes, on the left, structural, systemic, and social questions take up all the oxygen. We’re encouraged to believe external, purely material forces have outsize influence on who we are, what we believe, even what we’re capable of. But on the right, we deny that people belong to communities, preaching a kind of self-reliance that can be egocentric at best, if not delusional at worst.

Then the khateeb explained how Islam rejects this kind of zero-sum thinking. Want to get yourself to heaven? Focus on serving others. Putting others before yourself? You make yourself more receptive to God’s mercy and blessings. Being truly selfless is selfish. Being selfish is genuinely selfless. This echoes the brilliant ‘Allama Muhammad Iqbal, who repurposed khvudi from ego to mature individuality.

On the drive back home, I realized this khateeb had shed light on how my own life had gone from aimless to purposeful, from scattered to straitened (and therefore significant). Additionally, his language made sense of how I was teaching, why I was teaching, and what I was teaching. On reflection, I’ve broken this insight down even further, to three words: Surviving is thriving.

To understand this approach more philosophically, you might consider: There are certainly many reasons God chose to reveal the final iteration of Islam in 7th century Arabia; before we became increasingly globalized, then modern, then industrial, and now virtual and digital, and possibly even extra planetary, He chose a place on the (socieconomic) margins of even that time. Do we ever wonder why?

Why, a place closer to nature, more elemental, visceral, and tangible? To the khateeb’s point, Islam is a beautiful and easy religion because Islam rewards us for doing what we need to in order to survive. In most societies and most times, you needed family and community just to go on. Islam rewarded that—never asking people to go against their fundamental nature and needs.

But Islam also encouraged and mandated these behaviors in ways that appear particularly compelling, intriguing, and provocative now. I have come to believe that that’s because what we need to thrive isn’t so different from what we need to survive. We don’t actually need most of the food our economy produces to survive. As it turns out, we feel a lot better when we eat less, eat healthier, and eat more responsibly.

All you need to thrive is often what you need to survive. Anything more, apparently paradoxically, backfires. When we forget that lesson, we not only cease to thrive. We find it hard even to survive. Consider the world’s wealthiest societies, breaking down, becoming their own worst enemies, that cannot encourage themselves to do what life literally exists to—to continue!—and this seems inescapably obvious.

As might your next question.

What does this have to do with your halaqas, Haroon?

It’s not like we’re raising kids in a world where Islam is deeply understood, widely practiced, or generously realized. If we’re honest, our kids spend far more time internalizing messages from pop culture, social media, their peers and teachers, than they do from us and our faith communities. That they’re often still proudly Muslim should encourage us, but shouldn’t suffice us, either.

Sometimes kids can’t cut through the noise. Sometimes we can’t, either. I believe that when I was growing up, secular American culture was far more attractive than it is today. We now see a society that is deeply anxious, frequently sad, riven by tension, and beset by loneliness, that has lost faith, direction, and stability. There’s plenty of reason for that and plenty to interrogate.

But part of the reason is that nothing tethered American society to a set of core values and principles that maintained what humans need to thrive. I’m not waxing nostalgic—there’s plenty about America now that should be admired. (I mean, look at how courageously young Americans of all faiths are standing up for Palestine.) Nevertheless America is suffering and we’re Americans!

If America is doing badly now, the causes of that corruption were seeded a long time ago—like good, evil also takes time to take root and produce rotten fruit. We should ask ourselves what went wrong, how we can protect ourselves from those faults and errors, and what we can do to put things right. Too often parents will try to tell their kids that Islam is different.

I’d hope we instead emphasize how Islam is valuable. Meaningful. And necessary, especially now. We have much work to do on ourselves and in our communities. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot to offer outwards. But what is it we have to offer? Say it again. To thrive, survive. The goal of Islam isn’t just to make us individually better. It’s to make society, and the wider world, better, too.

When you read between the lines of our tradition, appreciating the wisdom that earlier generations probably just took for granted, you’ll find something remarkable. What is good for us is good for the world. What is bad for the world is bad for us. My parents tried to teach me this, drawing on our faith, but maybe it was too obvious for them to be able to clearly explain—they didn’t realize what they had.

That said, and here’s the big point, they embodied it. And years later, I look back less on what they said and more on what they did. And I see the genius.

Though it wasn’t until my fortieth year, when I swapped New York for Ohio and became a stepdad, that I saw my life transformed and finally began to understand.

Nowadays, I sleep a lot less. Less than ever, in fact. I’m generally and usually much more exhausted. I have far more on my plate and far less time for myself. But my mind, heart, and my body are stronger than ever. And that lesson has become embedded in the halaqas: We don’t just have to teach prayers, du’a, and ritual, as important as they are.

We have to teach the elemental requirements of individuality and community, which once were common sense, and now are—like everything else—up for debate. I can’t tell you how many parents have come to see in the last few years, panicked that their child is going to marry the wrong person. (Sometimes they’re right.) But here’s a question: When did you talk to them about marriage?

How did you prepare them for marriage?

Who waits until their child is twenty-five to tell them what to look for in a spouse? They devoted countless years to test scores, grades, resumes, extracurricular activities, and all of that is great, but on the most fundamental, foundational decisions that actually make the biggest difference in your life—crickets. If you want your kids to raise Muslims, they need to want to and be able to get married to the right person.

If you want that, though, they have to be mature enough to get married. (Yes, a good job counts, but a person with a good job is not by that fact alone remotely a good partner—many virtues are required.) They need to learn how to socialize, make friends, take responsibility, understand emotions, work in groups, see what it takes to be part of a community, learn how to give and how to take.

And how to sacrifice.

They further need to have the confidence and independence to be able to strike out on their own, in small but increasing ways. Once people had no choice but to do that. Few, if any people, were wealthy enough and even then, impossible. We didn’t have to think about why we did things, like have kids, or become parents, or be part of a faith community, because you didn’t really have a choice. (For better and worse.)

Now many of us have the resources, technology, and reinforcements that enable us to be alone in ways altogether unprecedented in history.

It’s turning out all but awful for us.

But why would we think a culture that teaches us that what we know at any one moment, that disdains historical knowledge, generational wealth (that is, the wealth that is knowledge, culture, and tradition), that can’t see beyond this year, is going to arrive at good conclusions? What we learned over time can’t always be distilled by any one person; that’s why cultural habits are so hard to make (and break).

You could sit and debate, say, basic human needs, get nowhere, waste the prime years of your life, travel down dead-ends. Or you could believe you have to; “we hear and we obey”—we do and then we work to understand. Islam medi(c)ates against that, by embedding our basic needs into our religious life. We should marry. We must pray together. We have to limit what we eat. We cannot go long without God.

But do we teach Islam in ways that emphasize that, facilitate that, and live by that? We need to do this individually, of course, but even more so, collectively.

That’s why, to bring this full circle, the middle school boys only spend a third of their time in class. A full third is making sure they’re fed. The final third is mandating that they go be with each other (and they do not need phones—phones actually prevent them from learning how to be friends). Maybe it’s tag in the basement. Tackle football in the yard. This is stuff we might have taken for granted years ago, but here we are now.

Through that, and with that, I hope they begin to see something: The idea that you have to choose between yourself and your friends, or yourself and your family, or yourself or your community, or yourself and your faith, is a myth, amplified by corporations and culture alike. It’s not only untrue, it’s actively harmful. While the philosophers and historians debate the origins, we have to build the rebuttals.

A rebuttal isn’t an abstract argument in a book. It’s families and communities people want to be part of, that don’t just withstand the shocks of a broken modernity, but have the strength to reach out and heal. Every single Muslim I know has reflected on how, in the past year, they’ve seen more people embrace Islam than ever before. That’s a huge responsibility for us; are we up for it?

That’s a huge insight for us, too. Might we have something people don’t just want but need? And are we doing everything we can to preserve that? And when we ask what that is, pay close attention to the ways in which Islam stayed constant across timelines. Back when certain basic physical, embodied, and social commitments were vital, Islam told people: when you do what you need to, God rewards you.

Now that those commitments appear optional, Islam makes them all but mandatory. It may be that you dislike a thing and it is good for you.

Allah (SWT) isn’t asking us to disconnect from our nature. In fact, He’s blessing us for doing what we must. That doesn’t change, even as circumstances changed. Today, Islam asks the same of us. Say, to meet in person, to pray the way our beloved Prophet (S) did, even when we have all kinds of virtual and remote forms of connection. Might it be that that’s because togetherness isn’t just what we needed once to survive.

But what we always need to thrive?

This first installment is a very rough draft of what might become my next book project, a series that will spell out how my understanding of the world shapes my approach to teaching Islam; in coming installments, I’ll get into more details, exploring how parents, educators, and community leaders must cooperate to bring about the outcomes our kids need to thrive.

What I spell out isn’t always going to seem easy or even be easy. It’s going to require that parents also commit to the big picture, prioritizing the needs of the future over their professions, social circles, and even daily priorities. But our future, and our faith, deserves no less, and our Creator demands as much. So please consider subscribing.

Sunday Schooled is a free resource, only as strong as the community we create.

Eid Mubarak to each and all!