News

The brother is from Sudan. We sat in the café frequented by many Muslims in north London. He is a refugee who has fled Sudan to the UK but faces the many challenges that Muslims are facing in the West nowadays. Our discussion came round to the issue of raising Muslim children in the West and trying to build their Islamic identity and worship of Allah (swt) in societies which are strongly pushing children to oppose the practice of religion - especially Islam.

Comment

The societal influences to westernise Muslim children is all around us on TV, at school, or even just walking down the road. A few months ago, I sat with a friend and his son while his son told us about a boy in his class who had two fathers, not a mother and a father. Added to this is the fact that young people who become more practising of their Deen can now easily be labelled as ‘being radicalised' and painted as being on a path which makes them a threat and on the way to becoming bombers who want to harm others in society. Therefore, prayer rooms in some colleges and universities are being closed down or have come under intense scrutiny recently, depriving our youngsters of even a place to pray their salah during the day! These pressures mean more and more people (especially the young) are in danger of loosing their Islamic identity and practice of the Deen.

Back to my Sudanese brother, we talk about the hardships in Sudan which has forced people like him to flee to the West in search of a better life. It is a crime that the regimes in Muslim lands divide us and allow their cronies to become stinking rich from the people's wealth whilst the majority of people suffer in poverty. These same regimes make life miserable for many as they implement the economic, social and political systems left by the colonial masters rather than the justice of Islam and the Islamic Khilafah "Caliphate" Rashidah system. The new refugees in the West arrive here facing all sorts of new issues in adapting to life in the West. However, one of their main challenges is the raising of Muslim children in the West where governments now have specific policies (like the ‘Prevent' policy in the UK) that actively seek to secularise Muslims and enforce the adoption of non-Islamic values. Such policies use the excuse of combating ‘radicalisation and extremism' because the basic argument such policies are built on is that ‘the more Islamic you are, the more of a threat you are' hence they focus especially on the young as they develop their Islamic identity and practice of the Deen. May Allah (swt) enable us to embrace, practice and strengthen the following of Islam as it was revealed to our beloved Prophet Muhammad (saw), as opposed to that which the Western governments are seeking to enforce on us and our children.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Taji Mustafa
Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in Britain