How do we get them to love him?

When visiting a friend at her home, in Maitama, four years ago, I encountered her 11-year-old daughter and a friend chatting in the sitting room. By the time I was leaving, about an hour later, the youngsters were outside at the car port, one friend accompanying the other to her family car. My friend had […]

When visiting a friend at her home, in Maitama, four years ago, I encountered her 11-year-old daughter and a friend chatting in the sitting room. By the time I was leaving, about an hour later, the youngsters were outside at the car port, one friend accompanying the other to her family car. My friend had already told me that the two girls were classmates in primary school but were now separated because they attend different secondary schools.
I watched admiringly as the young ladies smiled and hugged each other before one entered the car and left. When she stopped to bid me farewell, I asked my friend’s daughter the question:  ‘You were hugging each other so affectionately because you now go to different schools and won’t see each other for a while, weren’t you?’ ‘No’ the youngster countered my theory. ‘We were hugging each other because it is Justin Bieber’s  birthday.’
‘What?’ I asked in shock and Little Hauwa went on to explain. ‘When we reached the car, she asked me whether I knew that Justin Bieber was 18 years old today, I told her that I knew because it was all over the news. So we hugged each other in celebration.’ Needless to say, my friend and I were speechless at this discovery.
At the time I heard about Bieber’s 18th birthday I had no idea what he looked like nor could I recognize any song of his, even with a gun to my head. Yet this ‘unknown’ pop star was THAT important in the life of our children. I know that we had our fair share of pop idols when we were growing up, but since we did not live in the age of this information super highway, we got to know about, for instance Michael Jackson’s birthday a month after, in the next edition of ‘Ebony’ or ‘Right On’ magazine.
Today whether you care for them or not, a showbiz star’s birthday is promoted four weeks before and reviewed a fortnight after, so even if you down-play it, the media makes the event important enough for your children. The worth and so-called talent of these stars is hyped to high heavens, such that they consider them the most important people in the world, the role models to look up to and emulate. So how do we counter this, when we hope to bring them up to learn and emulate our spiritual figures and lead their lives according to religious injunctions?
And to me this is where the issue of Eid-dil-Maulid celebrations come in. We were brought up on the Maulid tradition. My family was and still is ahlus sunnah, but we had no idea there was something wrong with celebrating the event till the great bid’a debate was begun by Izala adherents. We were not darika adherents and we were definitely not Shi’a, but we learnt more about Rasulillah SAW’s exemplary and inspiring life anytime the Maulid day came and he was remembered. Of course we also learnt all those songs in his praise, where his bravery and incredible patience were recounted, where the names of his beloved wives RA and children were mentioned.
Besides the Eid-il-Maulid, the only time we were exposed to deeper knowledge of our religion beyond what we learnt in the classroom, was during the annual Ramadan tafsir. Again, we grew up on the yearly exegesis of the Holy Qur’an by the erudite Shaikh Abubakar Gummi. My earliest memories of Ramadan included the incredibly melodious recitation of the Holy Quran by the Shaikh’s tafsir associate Malam Ibrahim Arab, may Almighty Allah have mercy on them both. But then my mother was and still is a regular radio listener.
With the establishment of CTV Kano, we soon discovered Shaikh Isa Waziri, and much later Shaikh Jafar Mahmud  Adam, may Allah forgive them both. Today it is the hardest thing in the worlds to sit a child in one place and get him to listen to tafsir on either radio or TV.
Indeed in the rat -race world we live in today, most of us modern mothers don’t even have the time to be regular radio listeners like our mothers were.
I know for a fact that the only time I listen to the radio these days is in my car. And whenever we travel by road, I get to play some of these tafsirs, especially those of Shaikh Jafar, which proliferated everywhere because of his tragic death. I admit that this is the only chance I get to expose my children to tafsir and the seerah (life history) of Nabiy Muhammad SAW.
So if an annual event like the Maulid presents itself, I believe it is a chance we can grab to expose our children to the inspiring stories of the life of Rasulillah SAW and the pious predecessors as well as to instill the desired love for him in their hearts. From what I recall about our celebration of Maulid in my childhood, there was nothing we did that was not beneficial to our knowledge and understanding of the religion and I can’t recall a thing that was detrimental to our morality or spiritual well-being.
Beyond saying that it is an innovation which Rasulillah SAW himself did not do, I haven’t been given a single argument to support that celebrating Maulid is bad for our religion. And even at that, there are scholars who argue that there is beneficial innovation, bid’a, which does not harm the religion and is sometimes necessitated by circumstances. Traveling by cars and aeroplanes to Hajj, when Prophet Muhammad SAW used only his camel, is an innovation. But it is necessitated by circumstances of the day; and by the fact that Rasuliilah SAW himself had said, ‘whenever there are two ways of doing the same thing, choose the easier of the two.’
Today we live in a world in which desperate and dangerous moves are made to weaken our faith, to chase the religion from our hearts and to make our children grow up in a secular tradition, completely distant from religious and spiritual values. We must rise up to this challenge by making Islam real and captivating enough for them. If celebrating Eid-il  Maulid is the wrong way to make Islam more attractive to them, then we must find a way that we can get them to love their religion more and especially, hold Nabiy Muhammad SAW with the love and reverence he deserves.
In a world in which every Muslim is a terrorist until proven otherwise, we must find a way to protect the image of our deen. When our children are bombarded with images of pop ‘heroes’ and the events in their lives, we must provide them with alternatives by presenting to them true heroes with values that will benefit them here and the hereafter.