2020 April Class Notes written by HL, 14 year old high school freshmen male, written on 3/30/2020, class of 3/29/20.
Essay written by HL, 14 year old high school freshmen male, written on 3/30/2020, class of 3/29/20.
This week in the Green Stairs Leadership Academy my homework assignment was to memorize ayat al-kursi in Arabic write an essay on what we did in the previous class. I did not do the homework which was assigned to me. After testing, the teacher started the lecture at approximately 11:00 A.M. The first concept we discussed was socks. This concept essentially says that we should not be too fussy regarding the resources we have available. For example, if you don’t have socks and there is a blizzard, there are two types of people. One person would buy socks from Walmart so they can stay warm, but the other person would be prideful and say that Walmart socks are too cheap for them. The person that only wears the designer socks would eventually freeze while the Walmart-socks person would keep warm. This scenario also applies to Salat. If clean water is not available for wudu, there are two types of people. The first person would perform tayammum which allows one to make wudu with sand, dust, or rocks to spiritually cleanse themselves. The second type of person would say decide not to perform wudu nor would they pray as they didn’t have water available to them.
The next story we discussed was when Prophet Mohammed (S) ascended into the heavens on an animal named Barak. It was a miracle of god, he met all the prophets and saw all stages of heaven and hell, he was the only one allowed to pass a certain point. At first, God told him that there were fifty prayers that were obligatory to Muslims. Muhammed told God that 50 was too high a number so God took it down to five. During this visit, Muhammed (S) was given the “attahiyat-lillahi” prayer.
At 12:00 P.M we started the movie Moozlum and we watched it for about an hour. To give a brief summary of the film, Moozlum is about a young man named Tariq who is starting his first year at university. Rather than attending standard public school in his childhood, his father had him attend a Madrassa which is essentially an Islamic school that teaches Arabic and memorization of the Holy Qur’an along with the required academic curriculum. At this madrassa, Tariq and his peers were beaten when they did not recite correctly and this put a strain on Tariq’s relationship with God. When he entered college, he ran away from Islam and fell into the party scene. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in American society at all. I have seen many of my schoolmates who were very bright and motivated students in the past fall into drinking, smoking, and partying and many of them completely lost academic and/or spiritual focus of any kind.