Dear Muslim parents,
Assalam alaykum wa Rahmatu Llah wa Barakatuhu!
Preamble
This is not a parents/teachers association meeting in which new school fees or new calendar year is often discussed. It is rather a meeting of positive and constructive minds over the most fundamental issue in the life of man. And it is to be moderated by the guideline divinely put in place in the name of ‘Al-Qur’an’ by the Almighty Allah.
Your joys as parents are secret, so are your grief and fear. Hardly can you hide the one or openly express the other. Happy are those of you parents whose children are fortunate enough to tread the path of your divinely guided dream. And sorrow is the portion of those of you whose children are unfortunate to deviate from the rightly guided path. All of you will account either for what brings you joy or what pushes you into sorrow.
Prophet Muhammad (SAW) had admonished on this when he said: “all of you (parents) are shepherds and all of you shall be asked to account for your herds”.
Children are the most invaluable gift of Allah to man. They can neither be bought nor sold. Even adoption or exchange of children for money (otherwise called child slavery) is only a temporary act which will become a permanent question later. One day, the child will ask of his real parents or get to know that the foster parents who have been caring for him in life are not his biological parents. Then he will ask the permanent question: “whose child am I? This is why adoption of children in the Western sense is prohibited in Islam. You can only help to bring up abandoned or stranded children who are not biologically yours for humanitarian reason but not for the purpose of turning such children into your own.
As a parent, you may give your biological or adopted children your love and your ideas but surely not your thoughts. Because they (children) learn more and understand better from what they see than from what they hear. Children of today have their own thoughts which you may never be able to take away from them or even alter. You may clad them in the best attire and house them in the most comfortable residences. You may send them to the best schools and endear them to a world of unlimited affluence. But hardly will you ever be able to influence their thinking faculty in any way.
While you are busy interacting closely with their physical beings today, you will discover that their thought dwell in the abode of tomorrow which you can neither see in your dream nor perceive in your imagination.
Children are a bundle of joy. But they can also be a load of grief. At least, they form the source of both in the life of man. No man or woman becomes a parent without first being a child. What is perceived as experience in any human being today sprang from the childhood pranks of some years past. And the cycle continues.
Manual of Life
Everything in life has its own manual. For Muslims the general manual of life is the Qur’an; that anchor message of Allah leaves no stone unturned in the life of man. In chapter 31 verse 13 of that divine Book Allah relays to us how Prophet Luqman counselled his son. The verse goes thus: “And (remember) when Luqman admonished his son saying: ‘My son, associate none with Allah, for associating something with Him is a grievous iniquity’…. (Go and know that) Allah will bring all things to light, be they as small as a grain of mustard seed or hidden inside a rock or even in the earth. Allah is all-wise and all-knowing”.
“My son! Be steadfast in offering Salat; enjoin justice and forbid evil. Endure with fortitude, whatever befalls you. That is a duty incumbent upon you. Do not scorn fellow human beings nor walk arrogantly on land; Allah does not love the arrogant and vainglorious ones. Be modest in your gait and lower your voice when talking because the harshest of voices is that of the braying of an ass….”
The above verses of the Qur’an are a good example of how Allah wants us to rear good human beings in every society by bringing up our children in exemplary manner. Prophet Luqman and his son were just used symbolically. Nothing concrete can be achieved in this without the fear of Allah which every parent is expected to preach practically to his or her children from the very early age as did Prophet Luqman. And the only concrete substance in life is what forms the visa with which man is admitted into the hereafter. The evidence of that substance in any man or woman is contentment.
Elite Parents
It is however unfortunate that most Nigerian parents, especially in the elite class, do not see life as a queue which ought to be followed scrupulously. They rather believe that any queue, at all, is a fool’s route to success where short cut must always be available.
Those are the parents who create special class for their children right from birth. They show those children how superior they are to other children and tell them the category of children with whom they should be friendly not on moral but on material grounds. They provide for them what those children do not need. They take them to schools in very expensive cars and create in them the impression that money is not their problem. Thus, when occasionally, their children refuse to ride in old cars brought for them by their drivers, the parents quickly apologise and send new cars to convey them from the same schools attended by some children of paupers.
These are children who have never worked for one kobo in their lives. All they know is that money is abundantly available and meant for them to spend. They cannot fathom where the money is coming from and how their parents acquire it. And here are parents whose main source of income is stealing directly either by the use of pen in their offices or indirectly by deceit. With such dirty money, they sponsor their children in the most expensive schools abroad or at home. They follow them to school to grease the palms of their teachers to ensure that their children secure the required marks for promotion into the next class or certificates that will be used as meal tickets in life.
It does not matter much to them whether or not those children understand what they are taught in school. What matters to them is the short cut that will ensure the passage of those children through the University as early as 19 or 20 years of age so that by the age of 23, such children would have become Chief Executives of banks or multinational companies in which they (the parents) had fraudulently acquired major shares. And, with that, the cycle of corruption would continue unabated in the family.
Now, why wouldn’t such a brazing desperation pave way for mass cheating in school examinations and eventual monumental corruption in the society as now being experienced in Nigeria? Are the children to blame? What else is expected of them when you parents are prepared to buy anything for them including live examination papers? And the children of the less privileged parents would also want to take advantage of the terrible rot to succeed in life. Where such advantage is denied, they become desperate and plan to stand in the way of those who deny them. That is how criminal tendencies escalate in the society.
Some of you parents often forget that no amount of fraudulent spending can make any child rich except by the grace of Allah. Today, where are the children of yesteryears’ moneybags?
For such shallow-thinking parents the Qur’an has the following admonition: “Are they the ones who apportion your Lord’s blessings? It is ‘WE’ (Allah) who apportion to them their livelihood in this world; He exalts some in ranks above others so that the ones can take the others into their service. Your Lord’s mercy is better than all their hoarded treasures”. (See Q. 43: 32).
Today’s World
The misfortune or calamity afflicting the world today, especially, that of Nigerian society, is caused by the elite parents. Right from infancy, most children of the elite, particularly the white-collar jobbers, have been given the impression that they are born to be masters. And they behave as such at every stage of their lives.
It all starts with unwarranted lavish spending on children’s birthday which have virtually become the past-time of those parents,especially women. Sometimes millions of naira is spent by parents to celebrate the birthdays of their children in a society where many families can hardly afford one meal per day.
The implication of this is that such spoilt children are being practically taught how to spend money without being taught how to make money. And by the time they grow up, they would have been fully used to easy money while the parents would have then forgotten how they initiated the innocent children into the world of corruption through stupendous extravagancy.
Today, what used to be ordinary examination cheating in the primary and secondary schools has grown monstrously to become the national calamity called corruption even at the highest level of a government in power. We now have black market certificates issued in most of our higher institutions both at federal and state levels at the instance of naira. We also have criminal election rigging practically supervised by political vampires who wear the garb of umpires. There are law makers in our country who must take bribe before voting for or against any bill. There are law enforcers whose main source of income is nothing but audacious bribe. There are unrepentant civil servants who live like kings and queens while milking the society shamelessly without any regard for their pedigree. There are half-baked lawyers who are feeding fat on fraudulent opportunities while capitalising on the deliberate lapses created by our so-called constitution.
In all these, who will curb the ever-rampantly growing monster called corruption in Nigeria? Is it the parents who are so desperate that they would do anything, including illicit sex, to see their children through? Or school principals, proprietors and lecturers who are the real architects of examination fraud and certificate rackets? Or the officials of the various examination bodies who often facilitate and help to perfect the act? Or the secret security agents whose orientation is to call a spade a hoe where money is involved?
All of these and others not mentioned here are elite parents who can hardly come up with a clean hand on anything legitimate. How can they curb the largess from which they benefit so tremendously?
Unfortunately, some of you Muslim parents, in defiance to Allah’s instruction, have joined this terrible cartel. You feel satisfied with your children’s fraudulent mundane lives even as you are evidently indifferent to the spiritual lives of those children. This has caused some temporal agony in certain lives and spiritual melancholy in others.
An Elderly Parent’s Experience
Yours sincerely was in an Islamic meeting with some other brothers in Lagos sometime in the mid 1990s. While we were about to reach a consensus on a vital matter, a septuagenarian parent of four grown up children suddenly burst into tears. He subbed painfully like a house wife who just lost her first child at the point of delivery. Surprised and embarrassed, we enquired from the old man what the matter was since the issue under discussion in that meeting had no sad angle. In his response after calming down, the man who was a former Nigerian Ambassador said he had lost his entire life. He narrated his pathetic story in a very sober mood and concluded that he had lived his entire life in vain.
He told us how three of his children (all boys) had their secondary and university education in London. The fourth child who was a girl joined them immediately after she completed her secondary education. And after graduation, they all got juicy jobs and settled permanently in England. But by then, they had all crossed over to the other side of the spiritual bridge haven adapted to a non-Islamic life style.
This was, however, not the cause of his regret. The real cause of his regret was the attitude of those children to his own religious life which he claimed to have cherished so much. First, the children never thought it right to pay him any visit in Nigeria, despite his old age. Secondly, whenever he visited them, in London, none of them would oblige him the chance to observe his daily Salat as they often told him that such was uncivilised. After all efforts to persuade them failed, he had to abandon them and live like a man without children.
The old man’s most agonising point was in seeing the children of his friends who practised Islam very well in the same country (England) even as they were all doing fine in their various careers. The difference was that the parents of those other children had cared for their spiritual lives from the very beginning. That is the plight of a man who had the courage to voice it out after admitting his guilt. There are thousands of others like him who would prefer to lick their messy wound secretly till death comes to strike.
If this can still happen in a Muslim home at this age, despite the Qur’anic lessons abundantly available for those who want to learn, what is the value of life? Why would any sane person want to lose his life and his life hereafter just to gain vanity? See what avarice is doing to some Muslim parents?
It is only for the reason of avarice that most Muslim parents do not see any necessity in giving their children such qualitative Islamic education as they do in the Western way. But Allah has a wonderful way of doing things. Some of the children who could not be given formal secondary education some years past, because their parents were too poor, are professors in the universities or top professionals today in their own right and yet they remain solid Muslims. What else? Train your children in the way of Allah and leave what will become of those children to Allah alone who provides even for ants. Let your children know that the only antidote against greed and avarice is contentment which gives man absolute rest of mind and enables him to appreciate Allah’s endowment in his life. Anything else is sheer vanity that invariably fetches regret. It is only with contentment that any form of corruption can be eliminated. For you Muslims, there is a lesson in this to learn and disseminate to others.
Without Our Mandate
This is not the first time the Muslim Ummah of South West Nigeria will be alerting the nation about a danger being surreptitiously engineered by a group of Christians calling itself ‘Yoruba Leaders’ in the region. For quite some time, this self-arrogated body has been stirring ripples in a religious brook not minding the consequences of its action.
Following the announcement of National Dialogue by President Goodluck Jonathan in October last year, the group began to meet secretly in readiness for the Confab at different places without involving the Muslims in the region. And when a consultative committee was appointed by the President to work out the modalities for the conference the group quickly seized the opportunity to influence the operations of the Committee because the Chairman of that Committee was alleged to be its member.
Thus, as a way of excluding the Muslims in any decision that might be taken, meetings were fixed for the time of Jum’at service on Fridays knowing very well that the Muslims would attend the service. This happened in Akure and in Lagos where the clandestine act led to a tantrum between them and the few Muslims who were present for the meeting. When MUSWEN noticed the injurious anomaly, it quickly issued a press statement to caution on such clandestine move and warn against its consequences. Yet, the group continued to meet secretly to the exclusion of the Muslim majority in the region.
When another meeting of the group was held in Isara-Remo, Ogun State, a couple of weeks ago at which the group was reported to be collating the names of those who would represent the Southwest at the Confab, MUSWEN issued another press release to warn against the consequences of such a dangerous action. Despite these warnings, we heard from credible sources that the group has presented a list of 15 delegates (all Christians) who would represent the region at the Confab.
In a press conference meant to react to the impunity of the illegal, self-appointed caucus calling itself ‘Yoruba Leaders’ the Executive Secretary of MUSWEN, Professor D. O. S. Noibi said inter alia: “I want to make it loudly clear here that we Muslims in the South West region do not recognise the so-called Yoruba Leaders and we have not mandated any group to represent us at the Confab. Any decision reached by that group on behalf of the South West region will therefore be null and void”.
“We hereby call the attention of the Presidency, the governors of the six States in the region, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and the Director-General of the State Security Service (SSS) to this alert for security reason. Any attempt by a self-appointed group to force itself on the Muslims of this region will be resisted by all means. To be forewarned is to be fore armed.”
