We Pledge Allegiance To One God, Indivisible.
He's also Invincible and Invisible, but you already knew that.
Introducing the Introduction
What follows is a lightly edited version of my notes from our first ever for-real halaqa, which took place five months back. I hope reading this sparks conversations, provokes questions, and inspires new directions in your explorations of the truths of our faith. But if you do decide to incorporate this and subsequent halaqas into your learning, in return I’d ask a favor.
Your feedback.
What works? What doesn’t? What’s missing?
After all, every class, every course, every halaqa evolves. For example, I quickly took to heart the advice my wife gave to me about the experience of teaching kids—kids you’re now responsible for. Namely, yes, we (you) need to teach. To pass on our beliefs and heritage. To empower these kids to be full-fledged, autonomous believers. All that’s well and good and proper: They’re approaching the age of moral responsibility. However.
We should try to do so in a way that preserves and embodies consideration, compassion, and affection. We don’t want our kids to resent the halaqa, because then it becomes a resentment of religion at large—or, at least, it all too easily could. As such, while I planned for this first halaqa to take forty-five minutes, and it actually ended up taking over an hour, I soon understood I’d have to be constantly flexible.
I mustn’t take any of that personally, either.
Subsequent halaqas, as it turns out, varied widely in length, not least because sometimes the kids had exams, or sports, or were just tired. Or we elders were too busy—or too worn out. Some weeks we were forced to skip entirely or, instead of meeting in the house, we took the conversation on a long drive to run errands. It turned out to be impossibly hard to strictly limit ourselves to one specific day, length of time, or even format.
And you know what? That’s okay. Who gets through anything, especially with three kids, as planned? What was helpful to teaching the material was to make sure to set a time in advance the day of, to give the kids notebooks, to remind them to bring their notebooks and something to write with for each class, while arming myself with a whiteboard, dry erase markers, and of course a copy of my notes for the day. Thanks, Target.
Finally, we started every halaqa with a du‘a, or supplication, we’d first learned way back in Ramadan. It goes like this:
Alhamdulillahi rabbi al-‘alamin
Wa’s-salatu wa’s-salamu ‘ala ashraf al-mursalin, sayyidna Muhammad
We praise and thank God, Lord of the universes
And send prayers and peace on the best of Messengers, our teacher Muhammad1
The halaqa begins below.
Here We Grow
Last week, we learned the five reasons why we’re having this halaqa. (Note: You’ll find them at the bottom of the first part of this previous post.) There’s two reasons I want us to focus on today. The first: I want to make sure you learn your religion correctly. And the second? So that you can be confident. You can be sure of yourself as Muslims. So that you know what you believe and, therefore, who you are.
Someone who doesn’t know what she believes can’t know who she is—or wants to be.
When you grow up and start on your own grown-up lives, you’ll get to decide what you want to do with all of this, but you can’t make a good decision about any of it if you don’t have the right information in the first place. It’s a lot like voting: Most every American over 18 can vote, but how can you be a responsible citizen if you don’t know the issues, the background, the candidates, and the contexts involved?
Hopefully, though, you don’t learn American history in school to be a Republican or a Democrat—but so that you have a foundation upon which to establish subsequent decisions. In the same way, I’d like for you to know more about Islam. Not because there’s one kind of Muslim, but because you can’t make a good choice about what kind of Muslim you’ll be, if any, if you don’t understand your faith for yourself.
Does that make sense?
What’s The Big Idea?
Hopefully, you’ve all learned about The Declaration of Independence. Among other things, it tells us that the American revolutionaries believed “all men are created equal.” That’s one of the ideas that helps us understand America. In fact, America comes from the idea—the idea doesn’t come from America.
But just because we have that idea doesn’t mean that Americans always lived up to this belief in equality, or even agreed on what it meant for “all men” to be “created equal,” but the idea was and is pretty central to how we think about ourselves ourselves, even if sometimes we acted in the exact opposite ways.
In today’s halaqa, we’re going to learn Islam’s big idea.
It’s tawheed, and even though Muslims haven’t always lived up to it, in the past or the present—and won’t in the future; still, it’s at the heart and soul of what it means to be a Muslim. It’s not something only Islam teaches, but you can’t explain what Islam is, or why we do the things we do, if we don’t understand what tawheed means. (Here I asked them for their understanding of tawheed—and we discussed these definitions.)
As you’ll learn throughout these halaqas, there’s lots of ways to translate Arabic words. This one, tawheed, comes from the Arabic word wāhid, which just means “one,” as in the number. (I wrote all major terms on the whiteboard, first in Arabic, then transliterated, and finally in English translation.) Tawheed means “oneness,” “unity,” or “monotheism,” although the last one’s a difficult word.
“Monotheism” basically means we believe in one and only one God, just like we say in the shahada: La ilaha illa Allah. “There’s absolutely no god but God.”
Still, all three meanings—oneness, unity, and monotheism—convey the same basic idea. Not only that God created us, and everything, and that the only “thing” in existence that wasn’t created is God Himself, but that there’s only one God.
And the one God is one.
That might sound a little funny, so I hope you bear with me as we learn a little more about God, today and in the weeks to come.
We’re not only going to talk about tawheed but its opposite, shirk, which can describe different things, all of which come down to this: shirk is when we don’t understand God correctly. Shirk could be believing in other gods, but it could also mean elevating ourselves or our beliefs to the level of God, or for us to consider our desires and emotions to be the equal of God’s commands.
It’s thinking too little of the Creator or too much of creation. Any questions?
Here we paused for a few minutes, the kids stretching while I wrote Surat al-Ikhlas, the 112th chapter of the Qur’an, on the whiteboard.
Sincerely, God
After asking each of the kids to recite Surat al-Ikhlas, the Chapter of Sincerity, from memory, I translated it for them, wrote down and asked them to write down the translation, and told them they’d be expected to know the translation next week. (This was met with audible groaning and protests, but fortunately no insurrections.)
I explained to them that it’s really good to know what this surah they recite over and over again in their daily prayers actually means, which seemed to intrigue them. Or, at least, mollify them.
And now, Surat al-Ikhlas:
In the name of God, who loves all of us and each of us
Say: “He is God, the Unique:
God is Self-Sufficient, Eternal, and the Eternal Refuge
He’s not a parent or a child
And nothing can be like Him.”
Of course, there’s a lot here, far more than we can possibly go into in one halaqa, or even a lot of halaqas. There’s enough to think about and learn about for the rest of our lives. So I’m just going to make several points.
The first is that, in this surah, God asks us to say He’s Unique. What that means is not just that we believe in our hearts that God is Unique, but that we say it, we express it, we live it, we make it visible.
Because it’s one thing to love someone. But unless you say you love them, it doesn’t mean much. Then again, if you never do anything to prove your love beyond saying it, then maybe that means you don’t actually mean what you say.
In Islam, we believe in tawheed in our hearts, but we also say it on our tongue, over and over again, and then we act on it, we try to do what God asks us to, to live good, kind, and generous lives, as ways of proving our loyalty to God.
This idea, of not just believing but living something, is really important, and we’ll come back to it, time and again. That’s how Islam as a religion works. It’s not just about understanding something, but putting it into action.
Not just saying, but doing and being.
This is a good place to stop and ask them, if there’s time or you think it’s helpful, how their belief in God shows up in the things they do—or don’t do.
The second is that there isn’t just one God, like the shahada tells us, but that this one God is perfectly one—He is Indivisible. He can’t be divided. We’ve all heard this word before, from the Pledge of Allegiance. “Indivisibility” is important to understand for many reasons—and also distinguishes us as Muslims in important ways.
Like Jews, we believe in one God who is Indivisible. That makes us different from Christians, who believe God is a Trinity, that God includes three persons, a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit. In Islam, that’s shirk—it’s an incorrect understanding of God and because of that, one we cannot accept.2
The third thing we learn is that God isn’t a parent or a child, that God is unlike everything else, and that’s what makes Him Self-Sufficient, Eternal, and the Eternal Refuge. You see, Self-Sufficient means He doesn’t need anyone or anything. And because He doesn’t need anyone or anything, He lasts forever.
He didn’t begin and He can’t end. He always is.
And because He didn’t begin and He can’t end, He’s the Eternal Refuge, which just means we can turn to Him whenever we want to, or wherever we need to, because He’s always there to listen, to anyone and everyone, no matter what, and it doesn’t matter how big or small your concern is, because He’s aware of it all.3
This is one reason why we’re so uncomfortable with idols: God isn’t just Indivisible and Invincible, but He’s also Invisible. He doesn’t have any form at all. We reject any attempt to make Him like the things He made. That’s a form of shirk, and shirk is the worst thing, religiously speaking, a Muslim can do.4
Just like tawheed is the source of all the good things we do, shirk explains every action we do that God dislikes, from the small stuff to the really big stuff. For example, if someone treats another person badly, it’s because they don’t recognize that that person is a creation of God and has rights over us.
The mean person thinks their feelings matter more than God’s creation.
Any questions?5
To Be Continued…
In the next halaqas, we’re going to talk a lot more about who God is, what God is like, and why He created us—and how we should know Him and serve Him. But the thing I really want you to think about and remember is that God is Indivisible, Invisible—and Invincible. Nothing can weaken Him, harm Him, or challenge Him.
That means whenever you need God, He will listen. That doesn’t mean we’ll get what we want, and we’ll talk a lot about why that is later, but it does mean that whatever is bothering us—well, He’s paying attention. And here’s the thing: He wants us to say it. He wants to hear from us. He wants us to check in.
There’s a reason for that, too.
Here I paused, we reviewed the material, and then I wrapped up the class with a review of what we’d learned—and a preview of next week.
Before next week’s halaqa, we’ll have a short quiz which will see how much of the material you remember from this week. (You can imagine how that went over.) You will not be able to look at your notes to answer these questions.
But, I’m going to give you a hint as to what’s on there:
I’ll expect you to be able to translate Surat al-Ikhlas.
I’ll expect you to know the following vocabulary terms:
Wahid = One (a name of God)
Ahad = Unique (a name of God)
Tawheed = oneness, unity, monotheism; tawheed describes how we understand God— as such, it’s at the heart of Islam
Samad = Self-Sufficient, Eternal, and Eternal Refuge (a name of God)
Ikhlas = sincerity
Shirk = associating with God, diluting God; the greatest sin in Islam
I also told them to expect, based on their age levels, quiz questions that would ask them to reproduce the ideas and beliefs we discussed. Then I told them I was always available to help them study, to answer any questions they might have and, lastly, to let me know if they wanted me to talk about anything else in addition to what we covered here.
Then we closed with a du‘a, with one of the students—aka, the kids—reading Surat al-Fatihah, after which we were done!
Back to the Future
Future posts won’t just include notes from each of these halaqas, but sample review sheets and quizzes (when I assigned them) as well as the spin-off halaqas that we came up with, one on Islamic diversity for the older girls, and one on being a Muslim man for R, our youngest—as well as occasional commentaries on topics, issues, or content that I believe is relevant to teaching Islam. So, if you haven’t…
You’ll note the translations I make of Islamic terms, Qur’anic verses, and the like, might be different than what you’re used to—or even different from how I’ve translated some of this exact same content in my articles, books, or sermons. That’s because I tried to come up with translations that made sense to the kids, that communicated the point without getting bogged down in overly flowery or unfamiliar language.
Unfortunately, this nuance—that there isn’t just one God, but that God is perfectly and wholly one, is sometimes lost on contemporary Muslims. It may also seem and at times be far too complicated for younger kids, but my hunch, coming from years of teaching, is that even if not everything you communicate really gets internalized right away, a lot of what you say lingers. Sometimes they end up rediscovering it and nurturing it later.
More intentionally, though, my plan is to gradually build on these ideas, to unpack them, add to them, and nuance them, now and as the kids grow older, in the same way that we advance conceptually in reading, or writing, or math. And though this might seem burdensome to convey, I really believe a sound theology isn’t just intellectually useful, but morally valuable and spiritually empowering.
You genuinely will never know who you are if you don’t know what you believe. And you can’t prevent yourself from becoming who you don’t want to be if you don’t know what you believe.
Later, we talked about how this impacts on and explains (Sunni) Islam’s lack of (interest in) a clergy, a group of people who get between you and God. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t turn to people who know more than us to help guide us, but it does mean that those people have no special access to God. God hears and sees all.
That underscores why our family is so uncomfortable with Christmas. See my previous post on why we don’t celebrate.
It’s always hard to find time to talk about the important things—and being mindful of the dangers of becoming pedagogically oppressive (the term itself sounds tyrannical), sometimes I repurpose longer car rides as chances to have brief bursts of conversation and reflection, just enough to provoke something but not too much to make it overwhelming.
During Ramadan, we made du’as into a kind of activity: As we drove somewhere, we’d start with praise of God and His Prophet, peace be upon him, and then go around the cabin, asking each person to make a prayer for one thing. We’d do this maybe three or four times, and then close with an emphatic ameen.
My prayer may or may not include a Cadillac CT-5V Blackwing.
This is where you say ameen.