Youth Leadership and the Future

By: Halim Naeem
YRAC Aux Staff Journalist

The great Imam W.D. Muhammad is dead. May Allah have mercy on his soul. Quite frankly, I am not worried about him. He is in a better place relaxing with the God and Prophet that he loves, Insha Allah. What I am worried about is the community. I am worried because there is still a chance that Shaytan can sway us from the path of Allah. How do we stop this from happening? We have to sustain our community. The best and the only way to sustain our community is to develop our youth.

People have asked for ages how  to exactly do that. It is pretty simple. Development comes through two things: training and experience. Training comes in the form of mentorship and instilling good decision making skills into our youth. Experience comes through putting our youth in leadership positions to develop their skills. This is where intergenerational communication becomes critical. As it is, communication is horrible between generations in the American Muslim community across ages, ethnicities, organizations and regions.

The W.D. Community had an amazing conference during Labor Day and Ramadan of this year. We showed up in great numbers and displayed an enthusiasm and zeal for Islam that is nearly unmatchable. Yet, there was a major thing missing: the youth.  Though there were workshops made for the youth and topics that could even be considered “youth friendly,” the few youth who were there seemed to be held hostage or dragged there. The looks on their faces and in their demeanor read “This is not for me.” I appreciate how much work and prioritization went into the youth agenda from the W.D. conference. However, a critical formula was missing:

ownership + development = Leadership.

Simply put, if the community is to sustain itself, there need to be youth (ages 10-18 and 18-25) put on parallel tracts for the conference this upcoming year. I do not mean a few token youth. I mean whole committees of youth. There need to be concerts, dinners, sports tournaments, competitions, workshops, celebrities and much more. Once a sense of ownership is created within the individual, then s(he) needs development, which comes through healthy mentoring. Healthy mentoring comes from a relationship between a mentor and youth that empowers and does not devour. Once the youth develop to a point where they are confident in their abilities, and have created relationships in their areas of interest, they then grow into leaders. Communities who do not develop leaders for the future get replaced by Allah. In other words, the community dies.

This act of injecting youth into the core is not hard to do logistically. However, it is extremely hard to accomplish internally. This is because many of the people in previous generations are defined by and melded to specific positions, be they those of prominence or experience. This is why, in the last verse of Surah Asr, Allah says  “And strive together in patience and consistency.” We need to be patient with each other and open our hearts to one another. If we maintain the bitterness between generations, we will go nowhere. Let us find new leaders and give them multiple opportunities to develop our community towards the place Allah and his prophet have set out for us.

The Need for Reviving Muslim Youth Groups, Part 1

The Need for Reviving Muslim Youth Groups, Part 1

By: Halim Naeem
YourACreator Member

There is a tremendous and dire need to revive the Muslim Youth Groups from around the country. There is an outbreak of apathy that is manifesting itself in the passion and time put into the websites like Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo, and other chat networks. Ironically, this passion and feeling is going into the impersonal interactions of typing words on a keyboard and exchanging emotions that way. If that does not capture our youth, then music certainly does. Most commercial music is destructive to the human psyche over time. It is detaching many of our youth from Allah. Lastly, if the music and the internet do not get them, then its video games like the Wii, PS3, PSP, and Xbox 360 that eat up all the time of our young ones.

What is happening is that Muslim youth and Muslim youth groups, both national and local, are dying out. What is also happening is that the remaining organizations, such as the Muslim student associations and other Muslim young adult associations, are losing the quality and substance they are known for . This in turn damages the images of the masajids and the Muslims in American society. We are seeing an overall decrease of leadership and direction.

Many of these issues facing our organizations start within the families. Parents have to work more and more hours to earn money, thus spending an astronomically small amount of time with their children. This lack of parental supervision breeds more time for them to spend away from Islamic environments. This further breeds more time for them to spend by themselves. The more idle time one has, the more likely he is to engage in useless acts or time killers, such as the internet, television, music, video games, etc. Notice that these are all activities that one can do alone. Our Muslim youth are no longer fulfilling their need for proper, Islamic socialization. Most of the socializing is done with youth who are not Muslim, and they are being consumed by the spiritual emptiness that is a byproduct of interacting with machines all day.

What then happens is that there is no community ownership, involvement, responsibility, leadership, vision, or most importantly, connection. This spiritual fissure, this emptiness inside, leaks into the masajids and organizations, causing the level of involvement to continuously decrease. If this isn’t stopped, in years to come we will see generations that care more about the material things in life than they do the responsibility of establishing and driving an Islamic community into the future. Our communities will become just as diseased as that of greater American society. We, too, will be infected with the idea that intangible happiness is attainable through tangible means.

Whether inside the masajid or out in the community, there is a feeling of happiness you experience when surrounded with brothers- and sisters-in-Islam. It is an intangible happiness that only Allah gives to the people. There is no amount of money and no amount of resources that can give you that feeling. Once you have that feeling of belonging to something meaningful, that is when the condition of the community begins to change. That is when Allah puts the change into affect. This is one of the meanings when He says “Verily, we will not change the condition of a people until they change the condition within themselves.” It is up to us to change our condition. The transition must begin now.

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