Changing the nature of Islamic education
Understanding Islamic education – Islamic pedagogy – with sincerity means including the whole American Muslim community, not just the segments we are familiar with or that we know personally. We need to get out of our comfort zone to address the real issues.
An excerpt from this powerful piece:
“The Muslim American community cannot sit comfortably in isolation. In fact, our failure to address the realities of black American Muslims is becoming more evident as neighborhoods around inner city mosques crumble and some communities have lost their youth to the streets. Many grassroots programs lack support from mainstream Muslim organizations. There are a number of well-intentioned activist Muslims of immigrant descent who are on the forefront of protesting police brutality and addressing the prison industrial complex, but many of these activists are well versed in secular activism and often by-pass initiatives led by black American Muslims, which only further marginalizes black Muslim voices. It is time that Muslim social and civil society institutions build bridges and empower the disadvantaged and protest in the same ways that they do for oppressed Muslims abroad or of the government spying of Muslims at home. For many of us black Muslims, addressing police brutality, gun violence, education and health care access is not an intellectual exercise or some activist phase of our youth. It is our very survival. I ask you to care because Renisha is me, Oscar is me, Trayvon is me, Eric Garner is me. And there are millions of us facing this type of discrimination and profiling on a day to day, hour to hour, basis.
“Instead of making Islam the solution to society’s problems, our communities have shifted to Islam is insulating ourselves from society’s problems. And that is problematic. And alienating. We should be enraged at Garner’s death. But we should recognize that this happens daily across the nation. And it is happening to a large segment of the American Muslim population too. And will continue to happen, unless we all start to mobilize and organize together.”
Read the full article here.
black board, white chalk 