Question
I heard in a lecture by Javed Ahmed Ghamdi that we should give “understanding to our kids about tawheed (unicity of God) and shirk (polytheism)”. Honestly I grew up in a Muslim family but nobody gave us this understanding. “Everything is just there” kind of thing and now being living in US Mr Ghamdi’s talk touched me from heart. Please ask him how can I give this understanding to my kids and probably for myself too
Answer
Please consider the following points:
For your own understanding:
– Appreciating Tawhid does not simply mean to appreciate that there is only one God. It means appreciating God that is perfect in every sense and has attributes that clearly define what should be our relationship with him. These attributes are summarized in His Names.
– As an example, one of these attributes is Basir (All Seeing). The implication of this for us is that we should not feel comfortable to commit sin or to do anything that does not deserve a servant of God. How can we do this while appreciating that He is watching us?
– As another example, one of His attributes is Wakil (Protector). If we truly appreciate this Name of God then how we can become extensively worried and anxious when facing the difficulties of the life?
– If we truly consider God to be the Only God for us, then He will have to be the only one that we unconditionally and absolutely count on, the only one who we would treat as the owner of our life and our destiny and the only one that we truly remain fully subjugated to.
– Knowing God is perfect, then accepting Him as the only God means we should value the same things that He values. Among these valuable things are moral values.
As you see the implications of appreciating Tawhid are many and are very deep. It takes a few seconds to say La Ilaha Illa Allah (There is no god but God) but it takes a life time to train ourselves in the path of Tawhid.
I think understanding the above can gives us many clues as to what we need to teach our kids. Of course for that purpose we need to avoid complicated concepts and just remain practical and use as many examples as possible and refer to stories of the role models we know. However, for the teacher, that in this case will be the parents, the framework can be derived from the principle that I tried to explain in the above words.
Answered by: Farhad Shafti
Date: 2014-12-06
