S2E3: Raising Confident Muslim Children in Today's Society

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So today's episode is going to look a little different. I got the suggestion of covering the topic of raising Muslim children in today's society. And it really resonated with me, not because I had an answer, but because I had a lot of questions. I thought about how to approach the topic and I sat on it for a few days, maybe even over a week. And I wasn't really sure exactly what to say when I sat down to record, but I knew it was important to talk about because I have so many young moms just like me who are raising Muslim children and they have a lot of questions about how that should look and what they should learn so they can be there for their kids when they have questions. And almost like it was a sign, I came across a private Facebook group post. It was like the answer that I needed. I love this story so much, and again, not because it gave me all the answers, but because it gave me a lot of food for thought. So I wanted to read you guys the story today, and I apologize in advance because it is a bit lengthy, but I think you'll find the value in the story, and I hope that it will help a lot of us figure out what are some of the first steps that we need to take in raising confident Muslim children. What does that look like practically, strategically, and what can we do immediately after listening to this episode or reading something that really speaks to us and use the tools and resources around us to make an impact? I love this story so much. It really resonated with me and it felt like I was the mom in this story. So I'm gonna read the post to you, and I hope that you guys will find value in it, and hopefully it will spark some discussions too around how we overcome the anxiety of raising kids in general, but specifically for those of us that are Muslim, how do we um have confidence within ourselves so that we can in turn raise confident children? You cannot give what you don't have. So I really, really love this story, and I hope you guys do too. And with that, I'm just gonna go ahead and read the story, and maybe I'll interject with my thoughts throughout. But for the most part, I really just want to get it out and then at the end walk away with some reflections. Now I'll be referencing my notes as I read this story because, like I said, it is a long story. Um, so apologies in advance if it sounds a bit robotic. I just want to make sure I get everything out, and when I'm giving my thoughts, I'll make sure to make that clear as well that it's my opinion and not part of the story. If Adam and Eve were the first humans, how do we explain the fossils of hominids that existed 200,000 years ago? And if evolution is real, is the Quran wrong? My daughter asked me this six months ago over a Tuesday night dinner. She didn't ask it aggressively, she asked it with the same genuine curiosity she applies to her AP biology homework. I froze, I frowned, and put my fork down and gave her the only answer I had at the moment. We do not question the wisdom of Allah. Science changes, the Quran does not. You just have to have faith. She didn't argue, she just looked down at her plate, nodded slowly, and went silent. But I saw the light in her eyes dim. I knew logically that I hadn't answered her question. I had dismissed her. You shut down her intellect to save her soul. A Muslim child psychologist said this to me at a community dinner last weekend. We were standing off to the side, balancing paper plates near the dessert table after I had quietly confessed that interaction to him. So, this is where I'm gonna give a little bit of my opinion before I continue reading, because I imagined myself in a situation where my daughter would come to me and ask me a question about our dean, and I wouldn't have the answer. And that scares me. The thought of that is so scary because you want to inculcate your kids with these values, with these teachings that you grew up with, but the reality is you grew up with kind of just a broad stroke version of that. You grew up practicing the deen, you grew up doing the things you you grew up believing or thinking you believe, but as an adult, a lot of that is challenged when someone is asking you questions about your deen and you don't have the answers. So I fully see myself in this mother, and it it was like a light bulb went off of my head. So I just really wanted to share my thoughts at this point in the story because I fully saw myself in this woman. I saw myself in getting a question that I don't have the answer to and seeing the light in someone's eyes dimmed. I think that would completely just shatter my world, and not in a catastrophic way, but in a revolutionary way of I need to do something about this. So I love that she talked to a child psychologist about it, and I love that the child psychologist gave them the feedback of when you shut down someone's curiosity and intellect, that's not the way that you teach them anything. He didn't look at me with judgment, he looked concerned. But for a smart kid, he continued, lowering his voice so the other parents wouldn't hear. That's not safety. That's a signal that her faith cannot survive scrutiny. His words stung because they were true, and I was asking for his advice because of what I had found just three weeks prior. I found my daughter's second Instagram account. I wasn't snooping, not really. Her phone was on the kitchen counter, face up, and a notification popped up. A username I didn't recognize. I picked it up to bring it to her room and I saw the preview. It was her, but different. No hijab, different clothes, but it wasn't just the appearance, it was the captions. They were witty, secular, full of references to philosophers and scientists we never discussed at home. I stood there in my kitchen for maybe 10 minutes just staring at the lock screen, trying to process the data in front of me. The girl in those photos was confident. She was engaging in debates in the comments. She seemed completely unburdened by the mental gymnastics she performed at home. Now I'm gonna pause here a little bit too because I see myself in this child. I see myself in someone who had to have a fork in the road between who you are at home and who you are outside. And I think that's because when you go through the rituals, you learn the things, but you don't fully understand them, it's very easy to kind of split your mind and be two different people, two different people living within the same body, but who don't show up the same everywhere. And I think it goes deeper than just code switching. You know how you are at work versus home. There's variations to who you are, but at the core, you're still the same. But in the context of faith and dean and believing, I think it goes a little bit deeper in that it's not just you showing up as a different version of yourself, it's you showing up as a completely different person. Period. Who you are at school doesn't match who you are at home, and she's gonna get into it a little bit too about the performative aspect of practicing your dean at home because you're supposed to. And this is something that I'm gonna touch on later on in the episode when I give my final thoughts about why we practice, how that has to come from within. But I'll save that for the end. Let's keep going. And I realized I hadn't seen that version of my daughter in years. Not at home, not at the masjid, not anywhere I was present. I didn't confront her immediately. I needed to analyze this. As an educated professional, I pride myself on logic, but I was overwhelmed by a data point I couldn't reconcile. Anger, betrayal, fear, all of it. But mostly I felt a sinking realization that I didn't actually know my own daughter's mind. I'm gonna stop again. I'm sorry for stopping so much, but I have to commend this mom for being able to admit that instead of jumping straight to she did something wrong, there was accountability on her part for the role that she played, the fact that she doesn't know her own daughter. So the blame is not immediately placed on the daughter for having basically a second life, it's what went wrong. It's trying to understand the situation and analyze it. And I think a lot of parents, I'm gonna throw myself in there because I don't want to be the type of parent that's just reactionary to when I hear something that doesn't align with something that I think, especially when the thing that I think at the core of it, I don't always know why I think it. So you challenge yourself and you challenge the situation, but you do it from a place of curiosity. So I love that the mom paused and tried to analyze the situation versus just jumping to conclusions. The version of her I see every day, the one who prays, who fasts, who sit quietly during Quran lessons, that version might be a facade, a way to avoid the uncomfortable silence that follows her difficult questions. I kept thinking about all the times I'd been proud of her, how she memorized surah without complaint, how she seemed so grounded. But now I was wondering if that wasn't piety, if it was just conflict avoidance. A script she'd learned to recite because she knew I couldn't handle the unscripted questions. I didn't sleep that night. I kept running a simulation in my head. When did the gap start? When did she decide that Islam and intellect were mutually exclusive? And then the harder question, why? A few days later, I sat down with her, not to yell, not to punish. I approached it like a peer review. I just asked her about it. She cried, not because she was scared, but because, in her words, she was exhausted. Exhausted from the cognitive dissonance. She said she didn't hate Islam, she didn't want to leave, but she couldn't make it make sense. I know how to pray, she said, her voice shaking, but I feel like a hypocrite. How can I believe in something that feels so disconnected from the reality I learned about in school? It feels irrational, and that broke something in me. And I think a lot of parents can resonate with this when you grow grew up knowing something or believing something and you raise your kids to be of the same faith. I think Christians feel this way, Jewish people feel this way. I think anybody who truly believes in something, and truly I'm gonna put that loosely because we're gonna get into that. But if you believe in something and you raise your kids to do the same, I think there has to be some devastation when you feel like you failed at that mission, you failed at that exercise. And I think this mom saying that broke something in me is something that's so real. And I think the daughter also saying, How can I believe in something when I go out into the world? It feels like there's a disconnect, that the things I'm learning about in the book and in the dean, it's not resonating with me in real life. And I think that's a very valid question, and it's something that we all have to take stock of and be ready to confront when it comes. And I'm gonna tell you what I've been doing to hopefully become a better Muslim myself. So when my daughter does have questions, I can answer them for her. Because I realized I spent years teaching her the how, the rituals, the rules, the pronunciation, but I'd never equipped her with the why. I had raised a critical thinker, but I expected her to turn off her brain when she entered into the prayer room. I'd given her the dogma, but never the foundation. So when her friends at school questioned things, or when her own logic found a contradiction, she had no framework to process it. Instead of coming to me, the person who shut her down, she built a second life where she didn't have to defend the indefensible. Again, the mom taking accountability by saying the person who shut her down. I think that's so beautiful. It's vulnerable, but it's accountable. It's you understanding the role that you play in your kids, whether you do it consciously or subconsciously. So I think even her noticing that her daughter shut down after she answered that question so in incompletely, you know, I think that was a good moment of self-awareness, of being aware of your surroundings and how you interact and impact your kids. There's a lot of parents who don't care. They're gonna tell you, don't ask questions, and that is the end of it. So I think the mom taking the extra steps to understand her daughter and these interactions they're having is so important. I didn't know how to fix it. I thought about sending her to more lectures, but I knew the traditional sermons would just push her away. She didn't need emotional appeals, she needed intellectual respect. A friend of mine, a fellow academic, noticed I was off. I admitted I was struggling to connect my daughter's modern education with her ancient faith. She recommended a resource I hadn't heard of, a book called Quran Made Simple. I was skeptical. I've bought Islamic books before. They're usually full of circular logic, of flowery language that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. My daughter is 15. She reads Orwell and Hawkin. She needs substance, not platitudes. But my friend insisted. She said this was different. It focused on context, historical, sociological, linguistic. It explained the logic behind the revelation. I ordered it that week. When it arrived, I didn't preach. I just left it on the coffee table in the family room, like any other reference book. My daughter picked it up a few days later. I saw her look at the cover skeptically, flip through the index, and then put it back down. But the next day she picked it up again, and then again the day after that. I didn't ask her about it. I didn't want to bias the experiment. About a week later, she came into the kitchen while I was making dinner and asked me a question. Did you know Surah Tul Asur was revealed as a response to the specific social decay of that era? I stopped chopping and looked at her. Not exactly, I admit it. She explained it to me, not as a mystical chant, but as a sociological argument. The context, the logic, why it mattered to the people who first heard it, and how it applies to the human condition now. I asked her where she learned that. That book you left out, she said, it actually makes sense. It's logical. I didn't push, I just said, I'm glad. I love that the mom used this uh experiment approach because if she had pushed it, if she had preached, if she had forced her daughter to come back, right, to acquiesce, it wouldn't have worked. I love that she knows her daughter. She's very smart, she's 15, she is curious intellectually, so allowing her daughter to come to her own conclusions. She could have picked up that book and still not be satisfied. But the fact that the door was left open, the resources were made available, and the conversation was able to be had in a non-judgmental way, I just think that's so beautiful. Over the next few weeks, something shifted. Not dramatically, not overnight, but the nature of her questions changed. They weren't gotcha questions anymore. They were research questions. Why do we fast? Is it just obedience, or is there a psychological benefit? What was happening politically when this verse was revealed? For the first time in years, we were having intellectual conversations about faith. I realized that the problem wasn't that she was a skeptic, the problem was that she was starving for a reason. And how could she not be? I'd given her the command, but not the rationale. It's like asking a mathematician to accept a formula without knowing the proof. Eventually, they stop using the formula. I'm not gonna sit here and say everything is resolved. She still has questions, she still has doubts, which the expert told me is actually healthy. She still has that second Instagram account, but she's not hiding as much, and more importantly, she's not pretending. Last week she asked if we could read a surah together and analyze it. Not because I forced her, just because she wanted to understand the logic. That's the part that got me. She wanted to know. I think about all the years I spent worrying about the wrong things, worrying about whether she was praying on time, whether her hijab was styled correctly, but I wasn't worried about whether she actually understood the system she was a part of. And without understanding, for a mind like hers, faith is just friction. Because the second they leave the house, the second they step into a university classroom, they have to choose for themselves. And this is the part I was talking about earlier. When you grow up in a religion, when you're birthed into a religion, you don't always stop to ask the questions, you don't always stop to find out the why. Why do we believe this? Why do we do things this way? Why are we not allowed to do this? And sometimes, especially in Senegalese culture, we know asking questions is not always encouraged. As a child, being curious is not always encouraged. So I see myself in this little girl, I see myself in this mother. It's just two different versions of me. Like I this story just fully resonated with me because I see how we want to know the answers to things. And we've always been taught that skepticism is bad, criticism is bad. But then the antithesis to that is we are encouraged to be critical thinkers, we're encouraged to go to school and get these diplomas and be contributing members of society. And in any other aspect of your life, if you have a question, you ask it. But in this specific context, in your religion, it seemed like the questions were not really encouraged. And so this story, that's why I loved it so much because the woman approached it in a way where she's open to having conversations with her daughter, they're having the dialogue, and it's very, very important. And the last thing I'll say is yes, as an adult, you have to choose to practice the deen. You have to choose to believe all over again. So it's no longer that you were just born into it, even if you're doing the rituals, even if you know the Quran, even if you're doing all the things, you have to make a conscious choice to want to live that lifestyle. Otherwise, you're just going through the motions. And if they don't know why they believe, if they can't defend it intellectually, they won't keep it. They'll just build another version of themselves that fits the world they understand. I don't know if my daughter will always stay connected to her faith. I can't control the data she encounters. But at least now her choice is based on understanding, not just a reaction to silence. If you have a child who asks the hard questions, the ones that make you uncomfortable, don't shut them down. It's not about being stricter, it's not about blind obedience, it's about respecting their mind enough to give them the one thing we forgot to give them, the reason why. So that's the end of the story. And I absolutely, absolutely love it. I cannot say it enough. This story is what every parent out there who wants to teach their kids anything in life needs to understand is respecting the autonomy of your child, respecting their intellectual curiosity, and you yourself doing the work that it takes to give them the answers that they need when the time comes. And I don't think this means you have to know everything, but I do think it means you have to be willing to learn before the time comes, or when the time comes and you don't know, being humble enough to say, I don't know, let me look into that, or let's look into that together. And growing up in a Senegalese household where, like I mentioned, questions and asking them wasn't always encouraged, and sometimes you didn't get a satisfactory answer, and you just keep trudging along. You're like, Okay, okay, all right, this is what I'm supposed to believe. This is what they say is the right thing to do. But at some point, when you become an adult, you're gonna want to know why. And I have a personal share here. Um, I was watching um some debates online, um, Muslims versus Christians, Muslims versus Christians versus Jews, and I don't even like the verses, but anyways, I was watching them and I was in awe of the people who were able to defend what they were saying through scripture, the people who were able to reference a part of the Quran, a part of the Bible, a part of the Torah where they say this is where it says this, this, and that. It also says here this, this, and that, corroborating my belief, and this is why I believe. I think it's one thing to say you believe in something, but if you can't back it up, if you can't articulate why, it's gonna be hard for even yourself to walk away from a conversation feeling like you can hold your head up high. And something else that I want to call out is I I grew up thinking like, well, faith is something that you just believe in, but you don't see, and that's enough. Like that that, like, if I can explain it, then it's not faith because faith, you know, I've also been watching imams and experts talk about their rationale for why they believe in Islam and getting informed about what our scripture says, what we believe in, what science has backed up. So I want to do more of that because I think that is starting to scratch the itch that I've had for so long. And the woman in this story has had, the little girl in this story, and so many other people in the world who have these questions about their religion, about the faith that they proclaim, but they don't have all the answers. And that's what I want to leave everyone with is it's okay not to know. But I think remaining curious yourself, doing the work yourself to understand why you believe what you believe and passing that on to your children if you want to. It's important to do the pre-work. It's important to remain humble. It's important to stay grounded and stay stocked with resources. Whether it's your local masjid, whether it's an expert who knows more than you, whether it's the Quran that's been sitting at your home for years or months collecting dust and you finally dust it off and pick it up and start reading. And it's okay to have more questions and answers because somewhere out there there's an answer. And as long as we're willing to reach for the answer, it will come to us and it will make conversations with our children a lot easier, a lot less uncomfortable if we're able to either point to something or say, Let's go find out together. Now I know this was a pretty serious topic, and the tone of my voice wasn't that fun, but I do want to end on a more fun note, and that's that I have been learning a lot about my religion. I'm Muslim, if that wasn't already obvious, but um something that's been really fun for me this Ramadan is seeing quizzes that people post on social media, and sometimes I know the answer right away, and I'm like, oh yeah, I know that. And sometimes I'm like, I have no idea, and this is so central and this is so pivotal, this is so important to my deen, and I don't know the answer. So I'll go into the responses and see many people posting the right answer. So from then on, okay, now I know, but then I'll go and do research about the stories of the prophets, I'll go and do research about things that I have questions about, things that I grew up being like, I don't know if I like that. You know, I don't know if I agree with that. I'll go and do my own research, and I may walk away feeling like I still don't like that, but I think I'm in a much better place, removing the shame and guilt around having questions around not agreeing with something 100%. Because um, like she mentioned in the story, I think the blind obedience is something that doesn't sit well with rational thinking. You know, you wouldn't do that any other place in your life. If you go to give surgery, they're gonna tell you what the probability of success is, they're gonna tell you what this is gonna look like, what that's gonna look like. And so you walk into it with a certain level of certainty. But I think the beautiful part is even in surgery, even in that example that I give, no surgery is a hundred percent guaranteed to work, and yet we still do it because it's necessary to cure whatever illness we're trying to cure. And I approach religion in the same way in the sense that when I look up something and I'm not a hundred percent satisfied with the answer, it doesn't mean that I reject it, it just means I have more questions and I need to do more research. So I will leave you all with that and ask you what are some things you're doing to up your knowledge in whatever it is that you believe in, whether it's a religious topic or otherwise. And if you're a parent, have you ever come across a situation where your child says to you, What is this, or why do we do that? And you didn't have an answer. And lastly, what are some resources that you have utilized to bridge that gap between the knowledge that you have and the answers that you're still searching for? So this is just something that um I really wanted to share, and I hope you guys found value not only in the story but in the conversation overall. Thank you so much, and I will talk to you guys later.