Resuming A New Academic Year

By  Imam, Sheikh Dr AbdulKadir Al-Salman

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

The First Khutbah

All praise belongs to Allah, whose bounty and blessings are without limit, whose gift and bestowal are generous: He grants to whom He wills whatsoever He wills, whenever He wills, however He wills. I praise Him for His noble favours with the praise of the faithful, and I thank Him for His abundant gifts with the gratitude of the God-fearing. He makes some barren, and upon others He bestows children. Glorified be He: He created them and commanded that they be raised, that they might be happy. I bear witness that there is no god but He, and I bear witness that Muhammad — the finest of fathers to the finest of sons — is the servant of Allah and His Messenger. O Allah, send blessings and peace upon him, upon his family, and upon his noble Companions.

Servants of Allah, among a man’s gravest concerns, after his own integrity and his own felicity, is the felicity of his children and his offspring, and their preservation from ruin in this world and in the next.

Servants of Allah, that felicity and that preservation are to be attained only through sound upbringing and wise nurture. Yet it is a matter of grief that we behold a fire blazing at the bottom of the well; that we see wretchedness in the very places where happiness is sought, and ruin and loss where salvation and triumph belong.

Servants of Allah, it is the schools and colleges and universities — in all their variety — into which you have placed your children. A man among you labours night and day, all his life long, over upbringing — over an Islamic upbringing — and then enrols them in schools and universities; and there the children, in their schools, swallow down unbelief, transgression, vice and disobedience, and breathe in the reek of shame and abasement. They cast off the cloak of modesty, manliness, chastity and integrity, and clothe themselves instead in meanness, obscenity, vileness and filth.

Servants of Allah, in the face of this affliction that has spread through our schools, we have wished to direct you as Allah directed His believing servants, and as His Messenger guided his righteous Companions — the more so as the very core of our hearts is on the point of resuming a new term, in a new academic year, some few days hence.

Servants of Allah, take these directions and this guidance to heart, and guard your children by them. Shield yourselves and your families from the fire of the Hereafter, and deliver your children from the abasement of this world — for harm is to be warded off so far as is possible, and harm is to be removed. Take heed, then, O fathers and mothers.

Servants of Allah, you must know that the upbringing of children, and their safeguarding from the trials of the age in the schools, does not begin today. It begins from the moment you choose your wives.

Servants of Allah, choose well, that you may be at ease and your children be at ease with you — for blood will tell, and disposition leaves its mark, and the family environment has the strongest and most binding effect upon conduct. Fair words indeed are those of the poet who said:

If a man’s nature be a nature base, no breeding profits him, nor any man bred.

And al-Mutanabbi has the like:

All men behold the paths of courage and of largesse, yet the soul’s own nature is the soul’s commander.

Servants of Allah, choose well the mother of your children, even as a woman chooses for her children a righteous father; and the best of these qualities is religiousness. In the same manner, make the measure by which you choose schools the measure of the Sacred Law and of religion, and you shall prosper. For there are people, servants of Allah, who choose schools by the measure of high fees or low; others by the measure of a school’s history and its pedigree; others again by its elegance and its beauty. And the best measure is the measure of the Sacred Law and of religion.

O fathers and mothers, you cannot be with your children in their schools at every hour and every moment — that lies beyond your power. But what lies within your power is not set aside by the impossibility of what lies beyond it. That which lies within your power, in respect of your children’s rights over you, is the following.

1. Supplication for your children — for their uprightness, for blessing, and for protection. Here is al-Khalil, Ibrahim, peace be upon him, praying:

‘My Lord, make this land secure, and keep me and my sons from worshipping idols.’ [Ibrahim 14:35]

‘My Lord, make me an establisher of prayer, and from my descendants. Our Lord, and accept my supplication.’ [Ibrahim 14:40]

And how many a child has been refined in character and set upright in his affairs by his father’s prayer! As the Most High has said:

‘And those who say: “Our Lord, grant us from among our spouses and our offspring comfort to our eyes, and make us an example for the righteous.”‘ [al-Furqan 25:74]

And in the authentic hadith: ‘Three supplications are answered without doubt: the supplication of the wronged, the supplication of the traveller, and the supplication of a parent for his child.’

2. Sound Islamic upbringing. Nourish them with the milk of the Qur’an; bid them to the prayer; teach them noble qualities; and teach them the grave and the minor sins, that they may keep clear of them in their schools.
3. O fathers and educators, be a good example to your children. Be as you would have your children be; for children take their impress from their father and their mother. In Dawud and Sulayman there is a lesson; in Yusuf and his father a lesson; in Isa and his mother a lesson. It is for this that the scholars of education have laid down the maxim: ‘The example comes before the exhortation’; and the law of learning by conduct is no secret to the scholars of the mind.

In confirmation of what we have said, the poet declares:

The peacock once went strutting with a crooked gait, and his brood copied the fashion of his walk.

‘Why do you swagger so?’ he asked. ‘Because you began it,’ they replied, ‘and we but follow where you led.’

Then turn from your crooked course, and walk aright — for if you walk aright, they shall walk straight with you.

Do you not know, our father, that every branch keeps pace with him who schooled it?

And the stripling among us grows up after the habit his father schooled into him.

4. Respect your children’s teachers. Do not humiliate them merely because they have punished your children; and know that their intentions were never anything but the good of the children. Fair words indeed are those of the poet who said:

Do not grieve for the boys when they are beaten — the beating passes, but knowledge and refinement abide.

The beating profits them, and knowledge raises them; were it not for fear, they would neither read nor write.

Were it not for fear, all mankind would be as dumb stone — with neither refinement nor knowledge.

5. The matter of the mobile phone is among the causes of much of the decline in our children’s academic standards in the schools. Fathers, mothers and educators must not leave children alone with a phone, unsupervised, undirected, and without limits; nor should they give ear to those who argue that the basic principle in things is permissibility. Rather, parents must answer them that it is not to be denied that rulings change with the changing of times, places and persons.
6. O fathers and mothers, do not neglect sudden, unannounced supervision — for it is an important factor in upbringing in a diseased age such as this. Visit them, and check on them with their teachers. Keep watch over their standards, over their falling away and their advancing; keep watch over their lessons, their friends and their companions — for a man is known by his companion, and friendship leaves its mark upon upbringing.

Ask not after a man — ask after his companion: in him you have a sign by which, by nature, you are guided.

And if you take companions, then take the best of them, that you may go robed in the garment of perfections.

And shun the companion of evil, my friend, as you would a rash; keep not company with the worst, lest you be brought down with the fallen.

The Second Khutbah

All praise belongs to Allah, and that suffices; and may Allah bless and grant peace to His chosen Messenger.

To proceed: we have remained with you at the heart of those counsels that profit, at the season of the children’s return to the schools.

Servants of Allah, I now carry you aboard the vessel of counsels for our children, the male and female students.

O you for whose sake we toil and labour; O you for whose happiness we endure hardship; O you whose desire is our desire; O you for whom we wear ourselves out with troubles and with care, so long as you are happy and at ease; O you whom we set before ourselves even when we ourselves are in want; O you whose joy is our sufficiency and whose sorrow is a grief upon us — will you not listen to these counsels that deliver? Will you not pause a while to gather up these precious pearls?

Do not yield up a single handspan of your Islamic faith on the pretext of schooling yourselves in Western culture. Keep your Qur’an in your hearts, and not merely in your hands. And respect your teachers:

Stand up for the teacher, and render him his reverence: the teacher came well-nigh to being a messenger.

Do you know one nobler, or higher, than he who builds and fashions souls and minds?

Know the worth of your parents’ counsel and guidance, and the place it holds, and do not forget:

‘And lower to them the wing of humility out of mercy, and say: “My Lord, have mercy upon them as they brought me up when I was small.”‘ [al-Isra 17:24]

O sons and students, make ready for your future its full provision, with seriousness, striving, resolve and firmness like the immovable mountains, and shun the destructive things in speech and in deed. Know that you are the leaders of this nation’s future; make that future your ambitions and your hopes, and then strive to realise it — for the reward is in proportion to the hardship.

When souls are great, the bodies weary themselves in pursuit of what they seek.

And lastly, O you who are entrusted with the future of our children, do not stint the student children of their rights, but fulfil your duties as they deserve to be fulfilled. And do not forget a useful maxim of jurisprudence on this matter, namely that whoever destroys the property of another is liable — liable in this world and in the next. And likewise a further maxim on the matter: the disposal of a shepherd is bound to the interest of his flock.

O teachers, do you imagine that your responsibility amounts to no more than teaching them for a few fleeting minutes and then departing? It is no secret to your noble learning that ‘each of you is a shepherd, and each of you is answerable for his flock’ — a lesson for reflection.

Have you forgotten what is yours, and what is owed by you, O builders of glory, honour and eminence? Have you forgotten your living part in the life of the student — in teaching the learners, in building the minds of the heedless, in uncovering the talents of the obscure, in guiding the bewildered, and in being the first companion and friend to those who seek?

O teachers, men and women, in the schools: have regard for the individual differences among your students, and know that love is the foundation of education. Encourage them to put questions; teach them how to solve problems and to take decisions; respect them, and engage with them warmly. You have learned that dialogue is of more profit to them than shouting. Make their error an occasion for learning, and not for demolishing the person. Be their friends; be their fathers; be their mothers; be their counsellors.

O teachers, men and women — glad tidings to you this day; felicitations to you; blessed are you, for the happiness of society lies at your hands; and of you the poet’s words hold true:

O lamp in the corners of the classroom, shining, lighting the path of high attainment while you burn away.

May Allah never quench a light of which you are the source; O truthful dawn, you are the morning and the daybreak.

You are he from whose overflowing hand the pearls are scattered; and still, from you, good pours forth.

O our teacher, do not forget: your sweat shall never dry — for it is the fragrant, the perfumed.

You shall meet a reward of manifold increase, laid up in store; so live serene, and let no anxiety come near you.

• Imam, Sheikh Dr AbdulKadir Al-Salman, the Ubandoma of Ilorin Emirate, Imam and Khatib of the National Mosque of Nigeria, Abuja