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Our Children: Nurturing the Prophet’s ﷺ Spiritual Intelligence, by Anse Tamara Gray

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Anse Tamara Gray on how we should nurture the spiritual growth in our children and how we can plant the seeds of Islam in them.

Our thanks to Rabata for this recording. Anse Tamara’s photo is from Altamish + Hannan Photograpy.

 

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Embracing Otherness as the Prophetic Sunnah – Imam Khalid Latif

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The Prophet’s ﷺ reality and his personal  relationships call to diversity; he was exposed to diverse people of gender, colour, age and ethnicity from a young age; this theme furthers throughout his ﷺ lifelong relationships. Imam Khalid Latif  invites us to meet such personages as Umm Ayman Baraka and engage with otherness through the lens of love and empathy.

Imam Khalid urges us to reflect on the nature of identity, he tells us that we go through the steps of self affirmation and we place ourselves in boxes of identity, and once we do that we compare ourselves by that which we are not. The Prophet ﷺ was able to be an individual for all people, and generations for all time; this behooves us to ask ourselves who we are  and what our relationships are really based on.

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Cover photo from flickr. We are grateful to ICNYU for this video.

Raising Children with Deen and Dunya

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by Hina Khan-Mukhtar

I still vividly remember the first night I spent by myself in the hospital after delivering my eldest son Shaan. The guests were gone for the day, the hallway lights were dimmed, the nurses were speaking outside my room in muted tones.

“Knock, knock!” came a cheerful voice from the doorway. “Someone’s hungry and wants his mommy!”

The nurse wheeled in the crib that held my newborn, only a few hours old at the time. She cooed over him as I struggled to sit up, then efficiently handed him into my waiting arms, bustling out of the room after giving me a few words of encouragement.

I pulled the blanket away from his cheek and smiled in awe at this fragile, little creature who was being left alone with me for the first time ever. I felt privileged to be trusted with his care, overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility. No one was watching over my shoulder; he was all mine and I could do whatever I wanted.

I felt it was an appropriate time to take care of something that no one had thought of arranging so far — introductions.

“Assalaamu alaikum,” I whispered to the warm bundle nestled against my chest, “I’m your mommy.” I stroked his face and then asked the rhetorical question that every mother has asked since time immemorial. “Now…how am I going to raise you?”

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