Tom Facchine – Minute with a Muslim #288 – Our Best and Brightest Students
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the importance of having intelligent religious discourse in schools, and how children should pursue these fields instead of wasting their own time. They emphasize the need for parents to encourage their children to pursue these fields, as children enjoy social scope and social circle, and it is difficult to see a change in their religious tone.
AI: Summary ©
If we want to have an intelligent religious discourse, one of the most important things that we can do is put our best and brightest students in the service of the religion. What happens now across the Muslim world, whether it's in a Muslim majority country or not, is that the students who are the most intelligent and the most gifted academically, they get put into medicine, and they get put into engineering, and they get put into law. And it's only kind of the leftovers that are encouraged to seek religious education. And that is a horrible and horribly short sighted mistake. And the opposite of what our tradition is for well over 1000 years, when the best and brightest minds not
only had a basic foundation in Islamic learning and Islamic disciplines, but they exceeded and were published in Islamic disciplines. So we can't have our cake and eat it too. We can't prioritize with our own children. And if you want to take account of yourself, ask what you would like for your own children. A lot of times, we're okay with our neighbor's kids say, oh, yeah, put them into you know madrasa or send them to go study Koran, or or to Hadith or fic. But then when it comes to our kids, we want our kids to go to Harvard and Yale and MIT and Oxford and Cambridge and get the medicine degree and get the law degree. And this is now set aside for a second what children wants to do
themselves, you know, but the principle of the thing is that as parents, and as a community and as a society, we encourage them to go into these lucrative fields, these fields that not just are lucrative in the sense that they are compensated well, but that they enjoy immense social prestige, and influence.
Which is damning for us because it shows how low esteem we have for the Islamic sciences and Islamic literature and Islamic vocation. And so if we want to change, we can't complain about it. We can't then go and see what x scholar or y scholars, the scholars saying and say, Oh, these scholars are so out of touch. Of course they are. Because who have we been putting forth the study the religion for how many generations, you're not going to see a change in the level of religious discourse or in the sophistication of religious discourse until you start dedicating the best and brightest minds to those fields?