2020 Mar – Class notes by 18 yr old M for 3/12/20 by DJ
DJ 18 years old Male Class of 3/1/20
Today when I entered into class today, we first had our testing session, which lasted for around 2 hours. During the session, I worked on memorizing the whole prayer and a couple of surah’s sentence by sentence. I also tested out with the teacher and I was unable to pass unfortunately but I will next time.
This whole testing session was longer then we usually have in class and while it got boring after a while, it was pretty useful because I was able to repeatedly memorize my prayer and the Surah’s sentence by sentence over and over again in a repetition and I was able to practice test at least two times.
After the testing session, three Turkish visitors came to our class to just observe. Our teacher told two of them to recite the Quran the way they do it in Turkey. So they went one by one and recited a surah out of the Quran and the way they recited it was extremely good with perfect tajweed.
Listening to them felt mesmerizing and the way they were looking, you could tell that they were truly reciting from their soul which such conviction and emotion. They are some people who convert to Islam just by listening to the recitation of the Quran because of the way the melody affects their consciousness. They want to learn the source of this.
We must be able to read the Quran and pray and approach Islam/faith in general by being able to show deep conviction and emotion such as crying while listening and reciting the Quran because that will increase our faith and conviction in god, which in turn will strengthen our Iman.
After the recitation by the Turkish gentlemen, we started our lecture and some things that I learned were that in the tree trunk concept, the trunk represents the core fundamental beliefs in Islam such as belief in one god and Mohammed as god’s messenger.
The branches of the trunk represent the stages and evolution of Islam since its founding and how it has come to be in 21st century.
We also talked about the problems that some religions have such as Hinduism, where they worship a thousand gods which makes no logical sense and Christianity, where they have associated there god with a son. Also, the problem with Judaism is that they do not believe in the Day of Judgment where all of humanity will be judged by their actions and they also claim they are god’s chosen people, which is a very high level of ignorance because you are claiming your one people were only chosen specifically by god and the rest of humanity was not.
We also talked about the powers and abilities that the many prophets of Islam had such as Prophet Isa being able to make people come back to life and Prophet Suleiman talking to animals and speaking the language of various animals. These abilities represent the amazing powers that the prophets were blessed with.
We also talked about how just because a person was related to a prophet in Islam does not mean they were automatically Muslim and an example of this was Prophet Ibrahim’s father Azar, who was a disbeliever and never converted for his whole life and Prophet Noah’s son Yam who was also a disbeliever and did not follow Islam. I also learned that based on the knowledge of the Quran, we should never associate anything with god because that is known as Shirk and the Christians have made this mistake with the Trinity concept.
Also, you should never as I mentioned earlier, deny the Day of Judgment where everyone will be held accountable. We also talked about how killing is justified in Islam as long as it is done in self-defense, serving in an army, or if you live in a sovereign and civilized country where there are rules and laws in relation to fighting.
Lastly, I learned that if you do not practice humility and humbleness, then you will forget the essence of Islam and an example of this is our teacher taking his time out of his day to come every Sunday to teach us about Islam. You should always strive to help other people and educate them about Islam in a proper and moderate way and not a to fundamentalist view point, so that their ignorance and confusion can go away and there is less division and hatred towards Islam in society, especially Western societies such as America.