Advice for Young Muslims
Advice for Young Muslims
How to Survive in an Age of Extremism and Islamophobia
By Omar Saif Ghobash, Foreign Affairs, November 29 2016
Saif, the elder of my two sons, was born in December 2000. In the summer of 2001, my wife and I brought him with us on a visit to New York City. I remember carrying him around town in a sling on my chest. A few days after we got back home to Dubai, we watched the terrible events of 9/11 unfold on CNN. As it became clear that the attacks had been carried out by jihadist terrorists, I came to feel a new sense of responsibility toward my son, beyond the already intense demands of parenthood. I wanted to open up areas of thought, language, and imagination in order to show him—and to show myself and all my fellow Muslims—that the world offers so much more than the twisted fantasies of extremists . I’ve tried to do this for the past 15 years. The urgency of the task has seemed only to grow, as the world has become ever more enmeshed in a cycle of jihadist violence and Islamophobia .
Today, I am the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to Russia , and I try to bring to my work an attitude of openness to ideas and possibilities. In that spirit, I have written a series of letters to Saif, with the intention of opening his eyes to some of the questions he is likely to face as he grow ups, and to a range of possible answers. I want my sons and their generation of Muslims to understand how to be faithful to Islam and its deepest values while charting a course through a complex world. I want them to discover through observation and thought that there need be no conflict between Islam and the rest of the world. I want them to understand that even in matters of religion, there are many choices that we must make. I want my sons’ generation of Muslims to realize that they have the right—and the obligation—to think about and to decide what is right and what is wrong, what is Islamic and what is peripheral to the faith.
To read his letters to his son (and I believe we should all do so) click this link to take you to the whole article:
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This advice is written by an intelligent educated sophisticated prominent government official, advice that unfortunately is lost on most extremist jihadi Muslims.
Obviously there are no Young Muslims on this site, just thieridefenders who refuse to acknowledge a POSITIVE article about Islam or Muslims has been posted by me.
Excellent article, Buzz! Good advice from a wise man!
Hey John!!! This is MY kind of Muslim, so where's the "Islamophobia" accusation?