Purity of Intentions

All participants are asked to bathe and make Wudu before they come and bring with them the following: For, without them nothing in Islam works or counts. Part of the reason Muslims are in the sorry mess they are in today is due to problems with their motives and intentions at a lot of different levels – mostly on the part of those working in various positions of influence and leadership among Muslims.

It is a terrible thing to say, but it is something that bears looking into.

The very first Hadith recorded by Imam Bukhari – not one of the new American-type pseudo-Imams that Muslim national and other organizations have foisted on the Muslim masses, but a real spiritual and intellectual leader and by acclamation the greatest and most trusted and respected scholar of Hadith in history and therefore a real Imam of Muslims – is on the subject of motives and intentions.

The exact words of the Hadith are: Innamal a’amaalu binniyyaat.

Paraphrase: Actions count and they matter and work only when they proceed from right motives and intentions.

This goes back to the old saying: You can take a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. Meaning it is the horse that eventually will have to do the drinking and not you. That means unless people are personally motivated to learn, they are not likely to make the effort that is needed for success.

Poor motivation is often the problem with those who have difficulty dealing with learning situations and challenges. In general, it is one of the underlying causes of the backwardness of Muslims across the board, which is a mark of failure or serious limitation on the part of Muslim leadership, also, across the board, which has failed to do what it takes to motivate and inspire their flocks.

The Qur’an is as clear on this subject as it can be. It says: Laisa lil insaani illaa maa sa’aa. The implication is that, in Allah’s scheme of running this world, outcomes and results are going to be firmly rooted in people’s motivations and efforts.

Good attitude is key to success with regard to every thing in life. Without it, life becomes dull, work becomes drudgery and success becomes moot. Learning-teaching situations are no exceptions to this general rule.

That is why the camp insists that those who come to attend do so accompanied by an attitude of profound respect: for themselves; for the environment of the class or the camp; for their fellow campers; and for the teachers, guides and camp counselors.

In addition, they should also display the greatest respect for Allah; for the Qur’an; for Islam; for Muslims; and for the entire teaching-learning enterprise. Absent that kind of pervasive respect, effective learning cannot take place: Teachers will find it hard to teach and students and campers will find it equally hard to benefit from the strivings and talents of their teachers.

These are brave and dedicated men, women and children who first taught themselves the Qur’an and have now devoted their lives to teach the Qur’an to those who know less than them.

Teachers in this camp are people who have all individually and collectively turned their homes and families into classrooms and instant experts to learn and teach Qur’an all at the same time.

Some of them have struggled for decades to be on the right side of the Qur’an as it were. Some other individuals Allah has placed in a class all by themselves. It is through their dedication and single-mindedness that Qur’an has made the kind of progress that it has made in the Caribbean.

There are at least three families I want to single out in which both parents as well as all children are involved as teachers and counselors in this camp. The term that they all use for themselves, out of their great sense of modesty and humility, is facilitators.

In one family of teachers – or facilitators – at the camp, the father is a charted accountant, one of the first to be trained in England from the West Indies and associated with Islamic work in this part of the world for the better part of the last four decades, ever since his early youth.

The wife dedicated herself to teach children at every opportunity she would get. She is the veteran of a monumental personal struggle to teach herself to read Surah Yaseen when it was one of the hardest things for her to do. And their brilliant teenage son who is on his way to university is a computer expert among other things.

The father is also a man with perhaps the largest number of Hajj to his credit from this part of the world: no less than 23 and counting. May Allah accept his multiple Hajj trips and grant him and his family and all of us and our families their blessings. His efforts and sacrifices in working for Allah are legendary.

In another family, the father is an engineer with a Ph.D. and a leading developer of housing and other national- and regional-level construction projects. Allah has blessed him, along with others mentioned here, with a level of dedication and unreserved readiness to work for Islam that can only be described as a degree of Siddeeqiyyat in our times.

Whenever an avenue or opportunity to work for Allah comes up, he always says yes and jumps at it.

The wife who is a professional teacher and math expert is a high government official in the Ministry of Education. Her struggle to learn to read the Qur’an is an example for all men and women who are in a similar situation. Their two boys and a girl are brilliant students, the oldest approaching high school graduation and the youngest barely past 10. At every step, the children were learning and teaching the Qur’an all at the same time, leaving their own teacher in awe at how well they did it.

A third family turned teachers has a father who is a university professor and a math and computer expert. When it was explained during a Qur’an program that what people take out of the Qur’an depends on the container they bring to the Qur’an, he announced: In that case I will drive my own tanker to the Qur’an.

The mother runs and manages her own training school for university-bound teenagers. Her pioneering role in persuading and pressuring her own teacher to help her to finish reading and learning Surah Yaseen is a great example for everyone with any love for the Qur’an and with any desire to learn to read it. The older daughter is a university student who literally grew up with the Qur’an; the other daughter is about to graduate from high school. And the son is barely touching early teens.

These are entire families whom Allah has blessed and turned into cadres of trained Qur’an readers and teachers – some of them no older than 10 or 12 years of age. For generations with their mother tongue as English, and without knowing a single word of Arabic, they learned to read the Qur’an correctly and well and now, with the help and blessing of Allah, they have devoted themselves, among many others like them, to share Allah’s blessings with others by helping them to learn to read the Qur’an.

May Allah bless, guide, help and protect them all and open their hearts and minds even more to his glorious book.

The camp operates on the basis of the simple principle of Each One, Teach One. That means whoever learns whatever part of the Reader or the Qur’an then turns around and helps out and teaches those who are below them or who know less than them.

This dynamic model of a self-sustaining and perpetual upward learning-teaching spiral is drawn from a most beautiful Hadith in Bukhari Sharif which says: Khairukum man ta’allamal Qur’ana wa ‘allamahu.

Here is a quick paraphrase of the noble Hadith: “The best people among you are those who learn the Qur’an and then turn around and teach it to others.”

Thus, every student in turn becomes a teacher. The thinking behind this model is to prepare, train and enable as many people as possible, regardless of age, gender or educational level, to take the Qur’an to every home and heart that needs it – in the Caribbean; in the West as a whole; and throughout the world.