The School of the Ummah
The school of the ummah - a global school for muslim leaders, scholars, youth, and parents
The School of the Ummah is a transformative education initiative that builds deep community in response to the crisis of Muslim education in the United States and around the world. Our critical interventions are focused in five primary areas:
Through community workshops what we are calling Future Ummah Builders
In year long youth leadership development programs focused on the transitionary years between elementary and middle school, middle school and high school, and high school and college.
Through Arabic immersion and bilingual education programs starting with early childhood education programs in preschools.
Through culturally relevant and Islamic rooted curriculum development and publishing focused on Islamic schools and parents who homeschool
And finally it is a continuing education platform to connect global educators to global parents and students.
If we are to change our condition as a community, then we must really reflect on the goals of education for us as Muslims. Most Islamic schools today are carbon copies of the US public education system that was designed a hundred years ago to send students into careers in factories that haven't existed in this country for generations, and to integrate diverse populations into the so called American dream, which we know has been a nightmare for much of our community. Today, the primary goal of most Muslims parents in educating their children is not for them to know Islam, but to know how to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or anything that will allow us to live up to these capitalist fantasy's that we have been brainwashed by.
Meanwhile at the elite private schools in this country, they use diverse progressive models of education to understand the intellect, emotions, and physical well being of their students. All with the goal of producing the next generation of leaders of the society.
So as Muslims with intentions of transforming our world, our intentions should be to raise a great generation of scholars and leaders, with sound hearts. Then our goals should be to end the military industrial complex and unfettered capitalism that are destroying our world while building a world that is reflective of our faith and believes, as the great Syed Naqib Al Attas has named it, within the Worldview of Islam. But how would we do that?
It starts before we even have children, in building relationships through marriages where we can have the proper intentions in having and maintaing beautiful lineage. This should be obvious but lets remember in the United States nearly 40% of child births are had out of wedlock with 1.5 million children being born annually to single mothers. From this intentionality we pray for our children to be scholars and leaders, but we can't place our children in regular schools and then send them to Zaytuna College or Qalam, and imagine those schools are going to work miracles teaching them alif ba when they are 18.
We have to understand as many Muslim movements have from Syria to Senegal that the key to creating scholars is actually in early childhood education and not in just teaching our children the Quran but also teaching them Arabic. It is incredible that immersion preschool programs exist throughout the United States for almost every language Spanish, French, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Somali language, you name it, but it is very hard to find immersion Arabic programs. Of course there are exceptions like the beautiful school, The Rose Garden in the Bay Area. But this would be the key in setting our young children on a true path to scholarship. I've seen this with my own daughter as she entered a Spanish immersion program this past year where you can send a child at two years old who doesn't speak the language at all and by the time they graduate at five they have a high level of fluency.
So we start there in early childhood education, and then we send our children to bilingual Islamic schools where half of their day is in English and Quran, Islamic Studies, and Arabic are all in the Arabic language. When so many communities have created bilingual pathways for their children in the United States it's shocking how few bilingual K-12 Islamic schools there are in the United States. You are actually more likely to find immersion Arabic in the public school system in the US then at Islamic Schools.
We have to start making this shift now, but our schools also have to be built by lifelong educators and not by Mosque boards looking to create a new revenue stream for the Mosque with almost no ideas around pedagogy or curriculum.
This is work we have sunk into over the last year and we have started looking for education partners to really dive into this work and our first, we are excited to announce is, Cordoba Academy in Lynwood, Washington just outside of Seattle led by Imam Bazi Abdelkadir. Imam Bazi, a graduate from Dar al Mustafa in Tarim, Yemen is doing the deep work at Cordoba of doing tarbiya (spiritual education) with the young hearts of our students. We are working with Cordoba to really dive into the future of Islamic learning as we build out the School of the Ummah. I'm even back in the classroom teaching a year long leadership development course with the 6th grade class.
Right now we are using Dr. Recep Senturk's beautiful book, Futuwwah: Noble Character, as we look at the deep practice of community service (Khidma) and dedication to this path of Ummah building. Over the next few months we will be inshallah launching our immersion Arabic preschool, with the intentions of building bilingual components into Cordoba long term, inshallah. We will also be launching a middle school next year with an Islamic rooted, culturally relevant curriculum. The incredible thing about Seattle and the greater Pacific Northwest in this time, is that it reminds me so much of the Bay Area when I lived there between 2006-2016 as there is the talent here in terms of scholarship and thinkers to dream big.