Talking Young: Ground Their Beliefs NOW

Talking Young: Ground Their Beliefs NOW

Speaker: Ustadh Abdelrahman Murphy

Event: ICNA-MAS Convention 2018

Opening

I want to welcome everybody to this session. The session itself is probably one of the most pertinent and important sessions that the entire conference offers. And just for a quick reflection, I want everyone to look around the hall and to see, mashallah, that the conference obviously is amazing.

It's very wonderful. I want to see the amount of interest in this particular session. Maybe not because of the speakers, but because of the title, you look and the hall is a little bit empty.

It's a little bit thinner. And the reality is that this actually highlights for us, this hall, the attendance of these sessions, not just this one, but any session that has to do with family building or family training or construction or refinement, it unfortunately always falls as one of the lower interest sessions in our community.

The Paradox of Family Priorities

I remember when Sheikh Abdel Nasser and myself had launched a seminar called happiness in the home. Anyone here want happiness in your home? Anybody? Raise your hand if you want some happiness in your home. So the session or the workshop was titled happiness in the home. We thought, you know what? Everybody wants happiness in their homes, whether they are children, whether they are spouses, whether they are parents, nobody wants unhappy homes.

So we do this workshop and we're very excited to do it and we go to a location and we set up everything and on Friday night, it was completely empty. I mean, relative to the usual crowds, it was maybe 40, 50 people. We were expecting probably, you know, a couple hundred.

And so that night we went home and we looked through our inboxes on Facebook. We looked through our email inboxes. We looked through our WhatsApp messages and we noticed that for some reason, we were always being bombarded with questions and ideas and problems and conflicts about how to raise a family.

Where people would email and ask us, hey, my kid and I are having this dispute. My son won't listen to me. My daughter doesn't seem to get on the same page as me.

Or young people emailing us, hey, my parents, they just don't get it, right? I'm trying to marry somebody and they're saying no based off of their occupation or ethnicity or the color of their skin. How can I get some help? Or spouses who are battling each other every day when they come home. And we realized that there is a distinct dissonance.

There is a strong distance between what we are willing to admit as a community we need help with. And evidenced by this is this hall. That if we did this talk on halal meat and mortgages and music, we would have standing room only.

If this talk was called jinn stories, we would have 3,000 people here willing to listen and also to contribute their own story, their own jinn story, right? But when it comes to family refinement, then that's the time that we circle to go shopping. That's the time that we circle to go take a nap in our hotel room. And this actually is indicative of the problem itself.

Is that we only make time for family when it's in crisis mode. I'm not saying that people who are here are in crisis mode. And I'm also not yelling at you.

You know it's always interesting when the khatib yells at the masjid for not coming to the masjid when everyone who's there is clearly in the masjid, right? So I'm not trying to make everyone feel bad. How dare you not come to family programs? You're like chill out, big angry white guy. I'm here right now, right? But the point being is that as a community, individually, mashallah, but as a community we have to realize that the building blocks of every community are the family.

The Foundation of Islamic Community

I mean we hear it time and time again. The first people to accept Islam from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم when he received revelation, his family. The first people that the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم would go to, his family.

When Khadijah was testifying to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم after revelation that you are a messenger of God, what was the first description she described him with? Innaka latasir rahim, you keep the family ties. When the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلمyou know in the Quran, Allah says:

Save yourselves and your family from the fire. There's no shortage of evidences that talk about how important it is to make sure that our families are strong.

But the shortage rather is our willingness to admit that every human being on earth needs to focus on their family. That this is just something that is non-negotiable. That you could focus on your career, you could focus on your social life, you could focus on your religious life.

But if you are deficient in your family, you will eventually crumble. Just like the foundation of a home, if it is not strong, it doesn't matter how expensive the furniture is. It doesn't matter how many chandeliers you got, or what kind of appliances you bought, or the cars in your garage.

If the foundation is weak, everything suffers. And we're seeing this problem today. So the first thing we have to understand about shoring up families with regards to the topic that I was given, which is talking particularly about raising young people.

Personal Reflections on Parenting

And there is, by the way, this incredible transformation that occurs when you have children of your own. Some of you may know that I have a son now, alhamdulillah. Last year around this time he was only a couple months old.

Now he's 13. That was a joke. No one laughed.

Okay. The point being is that, you know, he was a baby, like an infant last year. And now he's one.

But when kids are one years old, especially boys that kind of act like, I call him one teen years old. He's like a teenager already. Got a lot of sass, mashallah, from his dad, unfortunately.

But the point being is that there are two kinds of knowledge when it comes to understanding something. There's haq al-yaqeen and ayn al-yaqeen. There is knowledge which you know to be true, haq al-yaqeen, you know it, it's truthful.

But then there's ayn al-yaqeen, which means that you can see it with your own eyes. You're experiencing it in the flesh, in the moment. And having a kid turns all those lectures that I heard and that all those talks that we gave about parenting, it turns it from theory into reality.

And all the narrations about the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم and his incredible role as a father and as a husband, it turned it all from theory and narrations and stories into something that I could see before my very own eyes. You know Musa, my son, I'll give you some lessons from my time with him and then I'll conclude to people who are much more qualified. Like my teacher Shaykh Abdul Nasir, Ustadh of the Dunya, inshallah, talk about the family institution.

First Lesson: Modeling Behavior

Musa is very interesting and I think I've learned a lot about parenting just from this one year. The first thing I've learned about parenting is that as a parent, sometimes we put a lot of emphasis on telling. Sometimes we put a lot of emphasis on the verbal communication.

We feel as though if I can communicate and I can articulate my message in a way that sounds to me as being good, my kids should listen to me. So Musa this morning in the hotel, he thought it would be a good idea to take Baba's toothbrush and dip it in the toilet. So I look at Musa and by the way, my son is like, you know when kids have this look on their face where you know that they're about to do something wrong? We call him dushtu, which in Bangla means naughty.

We call him dushtu. Actually, he's so dushtu that when we say what's your name, he goes duttu. He knows, he's a naughty boy, right, he understands, right? So Musa took my toothbrush and was headed to the toilet, right? Why? Because the toilet has teeth too, Baba, right? We got to clean the toilet too.

So I look at Musa and I say, Musa, and he looks at me with that dushtu look on his face like and I say, no, Musa, don't do it. He looks at me and I thought to myself briefly for two seconds, man, alhamdulillah, I finally got through to this kid. He finally understands me.

How many parents have ever had that moment where you thought to yourself, I got through? Now, my kid's one, but your kid might be 21 and you still might be having these moments. I finally got through and then he looks at me and he goes, Baba, and I said, yes, and he turns toward the toilet and runs with the toothbrush. It didn't matter what I said to him.

What I had to do was get up from my chair. I had to take my toothbrush and I had to take his toothbrush. He has a little toothbrush, toothbrush in quotation marks, and I had to show him this Musa is for this, and I brushed my teeth and I said, Musa, this is Musa's toothbrush.

What do you do with it? And what did he do, everybody? He brushed his teeth. We become obsessed as parents with do as I say, not as I do. And we think that if we tell our kids what to do, surely that's sufficient.

But the messenger of God صلى الله عليه وسلم did not just come to Mecca, did not just settle in Medina, sit on his throne and say, do this, don't do that. What did the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم do? As a person, he modeled. As a person, he showed everybody.

He exemplified. He was the first person to do what he was telling other people to do.

(From Hadith)

The best of you are the best of you towards your families. And guess what? I am the best to my families, meaning you can follow me with confidence. I'm not telling you to be good to your families while I'm not being good to my family.

I am modeling this behavior. So if you want your children to do what you want them to do, ask yourself first, am I doing what I'm asking them to do? And when it comes to religion, alhamdulillah, these are things that we find to be pretty standard. I ask my kids to pray because I pray.

I ask my kids not to say bad words because I don't say bad words. But the one thing that I think we sometimes overlook is the impact of character. The impact of our kids are watching us.

They're seeing how I'm talking to my wife. They're seeing how my wife is talking back to me. And they're modeling exactly what they're seeing.

If I'm asking my wife for something and she says she can't do it, and I get frustrated and I raise my voice, what do you think is going to happen when Musa gets frustrated? What do you think in his head he's going to think is the appropriate response to when he can't get his way? It's going to be to scream and yell. We have an immense responsibility as parents to make sure that our young people have evidence for what we're asking them to do. That it's not just simply theory, but there are example after example.

Musa, I want you to be generous. That's why I'm giving money to charity. Musa, I want you to be kind. That's why I'm treating people with compassion. Musa, I want you to be just. That's why I'm holding myself accountable.

The Power of Parental Humility

These are the moments where you remember, and I told this story before and I'll tell it again. The moment that my relationship with my own mother became so strong when I was young was when she came and apologized to me. My mother, I know some of you right now are like, no.

Parents should never apologize to their children. When my mother came and apologized to me, why? Because she accused me of eating my father's food. And as you see, her accusation was based off of evidence.

They used to say that no leftover would last more than a night when Abdulrahman was home. So my mother, she thought, Abdulrahman, why did you eat your father's leftovers? Go to your room. You know that he wanted to eat that later.

I said, mom, it wasn't me. She said, yeah, right, tubby. Go to your room.

I go to my room and I'm sitting there the whole time. I never ate it. Finally, my dad comes home and he says, where's Abdulrahman? My mom says, I'm so sorry, Jim.

He ate your food. He said, no, he didn't. I ate my food.

My mom came to my room with tears in her eyes and she says, Abdulrahman, I am sorry. I was so shocked. I almost had to look over my shoulder.

Is there someone else in the room she's apologizing to? Or is it me? When she apologized to me, I realized something, that I also have to learn how to apologize when I'm wrong, just like my mother is apologizing when she was wrong. This is the kind of modeling I'm talking about.

So many of us are so arrogant as parents, we refuse to admit, even when we're wrong, guess where the hardheadedness of your children comes from? Because they see it in front of their eyes.

This is so important as parents that we have to honestly put it first and foremost, be the person you want your children to grow up to be. Stop talking about what you want your kids to be and do what you want them to be.

Second Lesson: Balancing Love with Discipline

The second thing is that we have to understand that, yes, we are teachers of our children, but we also, at the same time that we teach, we love them. And we make sure that every lesson that we give our kids is wrapped in love. I know a lot of people, you know, sometimes we talk about, I wasn't raised this way, and look at me, I turned out okay, right? That's usually like the common defense.