Medina Stories #03 – Advice For Students Going to Medina

One thing that my mentors did that helped me out a lot was that they pumped me up with all the great things about studying in Medina, before I was accepted. And then after I was accepted to study there, they told me all the bad things, right? So I watched as a lot of people who didn't have that kind of mental preparation,

you get an ideal right in your head, and you think that it's going to be perfect, and you think that everyone's going to be nice to you, and you think that everyone's going to respect, you know, and that's just not the reality. Human beings aren't like that, you know, and everybody's got stuff that they're dealing with, and every society has good and bad in it. And so, I was in a good place, because my mentors kind of prepared me for that. So I wasn't shocked. And I wasn't disappointed. And it wasn't like a crisis of faith or anything. But I definitely saw people who weren't prepared like that. And for some of them, it was really, really tough for them to deal with that aspect of things.

So I think that's one thing, just, you know, realize that Medina is just like any other place in some ways, and that there's people there that oppress other people, there's people there who do drugs, there's people there who do Zina, there's people there who it's like any other place, and we can talk about whether it's more or less than this place or that place. But that's not the point, the point is, you're going to, you can see it there, right. So you shouldn't

be thrown into a crisis of faith, if you do see it. The second thing is that, you're still going to be the same person. When you get to Medina, a lot of people kind of imagine that, once they get to Medina, they're going to be their most pious selves and their most hardworking selves, and then you ended up just, you know, playing video games and sleeping oversleeping, your prayers, I knew people who were in the university who, you know, had a lot of struggles, they were the same person, you know, they just, you're just now living in a different place. So going to Medina isn't going to save you from yourself, you've got to put in the work, you've got to work on yourself, when you're by

yourself or with one other guy in a dorm room. And you've got nine classes a semester, and you've got your lessons at the profits mess sheet, it's just you against yourself, you know, your only enemy is you, you know, you have to struggle against yourself, you have to discipline yourself, you have to try to get into good habits, you have to surround yourself with the right people who are going to push you but also going to encourage you and support you. And that's, that's really, really important.

The next thing I would say is that, from the academic aspect, everybody needs to have a program, right. And there's programs out there now that are online, much more so than when I got there, and much more so than when people before me got there. You know, people can waste doesn't matter how many years you spend there, right? You don't want to come back from a DSL, I spent 10 years in Medina and 15 years in Medina. And you just wasted it. Right? And not waste like the other I was talking about where you're not studying? No, there's people that can actually attend lessons and take notes and whatever and still come out with very, very little. And that's because they don't

have a program. They just follow things kind of chaotically like oh, so and so's taken teaching this class or so and so's teaching this lesson or come do this or come do that they never finish anything. Right? Or even if they do finish something, it's all random, disconnected information. It's not like a whole program where you come out with the fundamentals. And all the major fields have, you know, or disciplines of study that you need, and you haven't really gotten into the intermediary levels of any sort of discipline. Right? So and there's a lot of peer pressure to, like, some people will be like, Well, why didn't Why don't you come into this lesson? Or why aren't

you calling to shake, so and so's lesson, right? And you just need to have a plan and you need to have the confidence to be like, that's not my program. You know, my program is I want to get good in fifth. Or I want to get good in, you know, really good in Arabic, or I want to master the Koran. And so this is my program, and then you got to stick it out. You have to finish it and you can't let other people take you off your program. And you know that the first thing that you're gonna study, this is the first book I'm going to study. This is the second book I'm going to study. This is the third book I'm going to study and you've got kind of associates and acquaintances that can help keep

each other accountable, right? Because you know, otherwise you're gonna just waste your time.