Sunday School or Muslim Nation Builders? - Part 2

Sunday School or Muslim Nation Builders? 

Part 2: Why Sunday School is Failing Us and What We Can Do About It 

By Wael Adelgawad

As I mentioned in Part 1, I teach Sunday school to Muslim teenagers in a masjid and Saturday classes for the MNB program.

My Sunday school class is one hour long. My students are currently aged 12 to 15, though I have had years when the class skewed older, with mostly 15 to 17-year-olds.

First, let’s talk about younger children, ages 4 to 10. These children make up the great majority at Sunday school. At our Sunday school, the kids get a lot of playtime, and I think that’s great. It’s good for them to make Muslim friends and have a good time so they look forward to coming every weekend. Aside from that, they get basic Arabic instruction and some very simple Islamic studies teaching. In Fresno, California, where I live, we have a well-organized Sunday school with good facilities, Alhamdulillah.

Others are not so fortunate. As I mentioned previously, many Sunday schools are held inside a poorly equipped room in the masjid, or even in the room of a house. There is little playtime, and instruction often consists of rote memorization of Arabic words and phrases, the pillars of Islam, and the names of the battles from the Seerah. The children often don’t want to be there and definitely don’t have fun.

So yes, the younger kids in our particular program here in Fresno have the advantage of a spacious facility with a playground and a large staff of volunteers.

The problem is that there is only so much you can teach at Sunday school because of the brevity of the program. Actual instruction time is usually only an hour, or perhaps a little more. Still talking about the younger kids, what I have seen is that as far as Islamic studies go, they learn a few facts about the pillars of Islam, a very attenuated and superficial summary of the life of the Prophet (ﷺ), memorization of some of the shorter surahs of Juz Amma, and that’s all. And this gets repeated every year, maybe with a little bit more detail each year, and maybe not.

So by the time they reach 11 or 12 years old, they still have not learned to think critically as Muslims. They have learned the “what"—the” facts—but not the “why.” Just at the age when they should be ready to start tackling some of the important issues related to life challenges that they will face as adults, they decide that they are bored with Sunday school and don’t want to go. Since, at that age, it’s difficult for the parents to force them, that’s the end of their Islamic education. They move into the teenage years completely unprepared for the challenges they will face, such as:

• Questions like, “Why are you Muslim? Can you prove that God exists? Jesus died for your sins; why don’t you believe in him?”
• Misinformation-driven challenges to their faith, like, “Your religion supports terrorism. You oppress women. You force people to become Muslim. Your prophet was a false prophet. How can you follow a prophet who married a young girl?” And so on.
• Invitations to smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs, shoplift, or have sex. You might think your kid would never fall into this, but sometimes it happens gradually. Being around non-Muslim kids who are engaging in such sins normalizes the acts, and without a deep foundation in the “why” of Islam, Muslim kids can and do fall into these traps. 

If the child did not attend Sunday school and did not receive any Islamic education at all, by the time they reach the teenage years, it’s almost a lost cause. Parents assume the children will become practicing Muslims just by virtue of being raised in a Muslim household. The parents make this assumption even when they themselves do not pray regularly and do not take the Quran off the shelf.

Once they reach their teenage years, these kids begin to question the validity of Islam itself. They might go to church with a Christian friend. They might begin saying, “I don’t want to be Muslim.” They might have boyfriends and girlfriends, and engage in other sins. In a panic, the parents bring the teenager to Sunday school, coercing them to attend by means of threats to take away their electronics, their car, or whatever.

So among the teenagers in Sunday school, these are the two categories of kids that I, as a teacher, tend to see:

1. Kids who attended some years of Sunday school but still know only the very basics of Islam.
2. Kids who have no Islamic education and are already committing serious sins, or have wandered away from Islam theologically.

The latter category is the majority, unfortunately. I speak from experience. I have taught Muslim kids who have contemplated suicide, who doubt that God exists, who are curious about experimenting with homosexuality, who shoplift, who drink...

The parents then expect that I will turn these kids into “good Muslims” with one hour a week of instruction. The worst part is that many of these parents don’t actually care if the children become good Muslims, in the sense that they don’t care if the child possesses God-consciousness, wakes up for Fajr prayer, loves Allah and the Prophet (ﷺ), loves the Quran, says a dua’ before bedtime and upon waking up, and so on. They just want the child to stop smoking, get rid of the boyfriend, and get A’s in school. Stop disobeying, stop being an embarrassment. Maintain the appearance of a Muslim. This isn’t always the case, but it’s not at all uncommon.

If that sort of purely “corrective” approach were possible, the parents would have already done it themselves, by means of the usual types of discipline parents employ.

So what do I do with these teens? And what do Muslim Nation Builders have to say about all this? How would MNB’s approach be any different?

Continued in Part 3