Re: On Breeding an Islamic Way of Life: Raising Children
^ To become Arabic or not is a misnoma of the secular era we live in. Today we are English whether we agree to that or not. It is the language we choose to speak to one another in.
The thread was geared toward the upbringing of children. I have had people mention to me that it is pointless to teach children Qur'an in the style of madrassas today i.e. by memorising Qur'an without understanding. This is because they argue that the children do not understand it. However, the alternative offered is to attend grammar classes for Arabic, which are worse first you teach the children grammar in English or Urdu and then you draw parallels for them in Arabic grammmar.
My point was that they have missed the point ... the learning of Qur'an by heart is not to understand it, but to learn it. The Arabic needs to be taught like we teach our own languages i.e. by submersion. Otherwise we take the instructions of scholars and that should be enough ... to appoint ourselves authorities of Qur'an by learning Arabic or by reading translations is a path to failure and we will never break free from the mindset of reducing Islam to an academic subject.
Learning Arabic should be done by culture encapsulation not by textbook ... this way when we sit to learn Arabic grammar we already know the words and sentences structures can use them but we learn and categorise them we do this with our own languages ... we first learn to speak English or Urdu and then learn the grammar afterwards ... it is not done the other way round.
Fiqh is also such a beast ...