2020 October 11 – AJ – male age 15 – Class Notes
Today I had arrived late once again, it was already showing that I clearly wasn’t prepared for this class and if I want to stay in it, I would need to be on time. We started off the morning by reciting the Pledge of Faith and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we moved on to the 5 pillars of Islam which are Shahda, Prayer, Zakat, Fasting and Haji. Another thing we elaborated on were the 6 which were God, Angels, Holy books, Prophets, Divine revelation and Day of Judgement. The teacher went on to explain the concept of universal values and by you practicing these pillars that we just talked about helps you better understand these values. Our job as muslims is to make this world a better place for everyone. Once we were done reviewing we went into the first topic of discussion which was the replacement of the Stethoscope.
At first I had no idea why we were talking about it cause I really didn’t think it was related to anything important but it did. The inventor of the UV named Masood Ahmad and he was able to create a device that not only allows you to hear sound but to “see the sound”. So what does this have anything to do with the concept of universal values? Well I realized that the teacher was trying to get me to understand that I should treat this day as if it is my last day on this earth. There is no guarantee that I wake up tomorrow, so I should always push myself to the best I can. One good example of this was that the Prophet points to a man and says he will go to heaven. This man didn’t have wealth or nothing like that. He was just an average fellow, so the people asked why is this guy going to heaven? This was because the man always forgave everyone every night before he went to bed. He said Allah take me if you wish, I have no problem with it. The key thing I was able to learn from here was that you shouldn’t hold grudges and you must always clean your books everynight, which is something I need to work on personally.
We would then move on to something called an obituary and to get a better understanding of what that means let me give you an example. Let’s say there is a brother who wakes up and reads the news and realizes that apparently he is dead. As he is reading he is realizing all these people are saying horrible things about him and nobody was recognizing the work he did. That man was Alfred Noble and we should inspire people like this, have no selflessness and inspire to make this world a better place like I was talking about before. Same goes with the creator of 5 hour energy, he realized that he had made so much money that he is able to donate and make the world better. Another brief thing we talked about is that there are 2 different types of bank accounts, one being actually money and the other being soul bucks. Now you may be wondering what soul bucks, they are earned when you do something that is beneficial to someone out of the kindness of your heart.
We then resumed the topic of formative years, I learned that formative years are the years in which you are developing. It is basically your ability to process something and each and everyone one of us has our type of formative years. But here is a very important thing when you are in your formative years. Don’t be tomorrow if you haven’t mastered today. Don’t rush the basic steps, you need to take your time and make sure you do it carefully and slowly. Now you are saying, but Bill Gates dropped out of college and looked at what happened to him. Of course there are some expectations and the chances of those happening are like the lottery. The key point I am trying to make is that, don’t try and rush through this process cause it will mess you up. The teacher then went on to talk about the leadership section which is something that is taught in this class. The teacher told us that the trait of the leader is to be fearless but not to the point of where you make a fool out of yourself. Allow yourself with criticism, but make sure it’s constructive otherwise if all you do is receive bad criticism you will never want to be a leader again. We would then move on to the grave questions.
As I covered in the last essay we are asked three questions when we are in the grave.Who is your lord? What is your religion? What is your faith about this person? These questions can only be answered from your soul, if you did enough good deeds you are able to answer if you didn’t then you’re unable to. Like I said before Soul bucks, the more good you do in this world the easier it will be for you to answer these questions but the action has to be sincere. The teacher would then point out what it means to be a sponge or a brick. You see a sponge is someone who absorbs knowledge and wants to benefit from whatever they are learning. While others are bricks who always try and find a clever way around it, they always think there is another way around it. For example the teacher said, when Donald Trump is giving a speech he can tell that he is a brick because of how the president of this country acts.
Once we had finished our discussion topics, we started to test on our homeworks. I was able to do Surah Al-Falaq and Naas in both english and arabic. I then tested on everything starting from Subhana-kallah-hum-ma all the way to Surah Al-Maaoon. The teacher wanted me to start practicing on Al-Maoon and level 2 surahs.