Minute with a Muslim #189 – How To Exit The Secular

When it comes to how to make our way out of secularism, there's no easy answer that would be that would take hours to talk about. But one of the important points for people living in the United States of America in particular is that we have a tool that a lot of other places don't. And that is a strong tradition of homeschooling, a lot of European countries, I had classmates in Medina who are from certain countries in Europe that homeschooling is illegal, right? They've taken the logic of nationalism and the logic of secularism that far to the point where you know, whatever sort of lessons and values they want to indoctrinate you with, in the school, setting it, they consider it

an existential, an existential threat, to not have your children indoctrinated with those values. And so that's a much tougher hill to climb, then what we the situation that we have in the United States of America, where we have a strong tradition of homeschooling, we have a complete, right, politically, to homeschool our children and kind of take control of those sorts of things. And so that's something that, you know, we look at ourselves, and we have to lay the blame on our feet, rather than sort of some sort of external factor or outside actor or agent, because we have all these freedoms and abilities, or we're not really taking advantage of them. Right, you have places

and there's been a subtle change now where people have gotten involved at the local level in decision making, whether it's the city council, or whether it's the mayor, and there's certain places in Michigan, where now, Muslims actually have a fair bit of political power, right? Many, many doors are open to you specifically talking to people in the United States of America. It's just up to us to take advantage of it, and to get involved and to organize ourselves and to have the priorities and to make the sacrifices necessary to make it a reality. Obviously, that's not talking about changing things at some sort of macro political level, but it can, you can establish a

lifestyle and you can build a community within the United States that where your your day to day life is very much living according to your values. But the open question is, are we going to take advantage of that opportunity and actually make it a reality? I think the place to start with is education. And when it comes to education, I do think that homeschooling is the number one option for Muslim kids in the United States of America. Now, parents get overwhelmed with that, because there's a certain ideology or certain sort of myths that are and bullying, even that takes place about maybe you're not smart enough, or you're not an expert in education. And so you can do it. But

I don't know about you. But if you have some of the teachers that I had growing up, then let me tell you something, you can do it better than a lot of the official salary teachers in schools and that's no knock to them. A lot of times, you know, there are your your a good amount of unqualified teachers. But more than that, teachers are spread too thin, right, and they are asked to do too much. And so the quality of education that many, many people across the United States are getting is actually very poor, right. And so that's important to register, because you probably can do just as good a job by yourself maybe even a better job quite likely a better job, if only because you're

giving your child one on one attention. That being said, there are certain people who are in a certain situation or due to other circumstances where that might not be an option to them. But there are still things such as homeschool coops and laws differ from state to state as to what exactly is required, but there's nothing prohibiting you from for example, you know, you submit the paperwork that you're homeschooling your child, and then you can do a homeschool online, you can do a homeschool and the teachers might be your neighbors or the imam or something else. Right. It's not the law that just because you opt for homeschooling that you're the one that has to be the one

homeschooling, right, but it comes back to effort. And it comes back to priorities. And right now where we're at is that Muslims aren't taking the opportunity. And they're not making it a priority, because they don't realize how much indoctrination goes on in the national sort of education system. And they don't realize maybe their rights and the procedures. Some states like the state that we live in New York has several sort of hoops that you have to jump through that make it harder than others, other states that I've lived in, but education is where it starts, right? It's not going to be I don't think it's going to be a thing where you can bring your kid to Sunday school. And it's

going to undo five days a week, eight hours a day of indoctrination of various sorts, that's just not going to work long term, we have to be serious about decentering the school as long as the school the is the center of your child's life. That's an existential threat. And it's an existential threat to the Muslim identity and to the Islamic paradigm, right? If you're in if your child goes to a public school, then you should take them out for Juma that sends a message about your priorities right. A lot of people don't they want to do gymnastics and try to find a way for the kids to pray in the school or something like this or do gymnastics to have a third Juma service just for the kids

after they get out of school. Let's make it a priority and actually take our kids out of school. I think that's a that serves many more purposes. Right then then just the kind of, you know, we're not trying to

I don't want to say change the religion that's too dramatic. But we're not trying to make our Islam accommodate the school schedule we're making now the school accommodate a snap. Right. And in addition to that, I think yeah, definitely homeschooling is is a really, really important thing, starting with the education making sure that your kids have a different paradigm going forward. Because there's two things right, there is a level of systematic level, which things exist, but then there's a personnel level, right? I think it was Gandhi that said that you can have the perfect system. But you know, human beings can ruin it, depending on what they're made up of. Right. And so

if we from top down and pose, the perfect system, or the perfect Islamic System, or whatever we kind of imagine, what's the point if every single person is indoctrinated by certain things, every single person has strayed from Islamic values in the Islamic paradigm, right? So you need to work on both, right, it's not a call for one or the other. It's a call for both. And looking at the options that are open to us right now, talking specifically to Muslims who live in the United States of America, the biggest option for you is to build up the personnel, and that is your children. And that is largely done through through homeschooling, or through some sort of alternative schooling that's

outside of the kind of state curriculum. And for folks that are coming from places such as Europe, where you don't have a legal tradition of enabling homeschool, and things like this, and you're in a much more difficult situation. So it's even more significant and important and imperative that you try to provide your children with a paradigm that can take account of our account for the ideologies and values that are going to be put forth to them in the form of indoctrination and propaganda, right. And that's part of why for example, like Christianity has such a poor time converting Muslims to Christianity, because it's not make sense of Christianity. It completely accounts for the

existence of Christianity, whereas Christian theology can't fathom it's not it has no sort of way or paradigm to, to account for the existence of Islam. If Jesus was the last thing, you know, the Messiah, and that's it, and he died for everybody's sins, there should not have been in Islam, right. So its failure to account for Islam's existence puts it in a very, very weak position. And so Muslims, we have to be sensitive to the same thing. If we don't provide a paradigm that accounts for everything that our children experience and see everything that they see in the media, everything that they see online, then they're going to find they're going to fall prey to those ideologies much

more easily than if they're able to account for them and say, oh, yeah, that's this thing. I'm already aware of where that sort of thing is coming from and that's exactly what I kind of learned about right then we can make sense of it, then it's smaller than it's not self evidently true, right? And then you can potentially get out of even the state indoctrination unscathed.