The Muslim Youth

Prophet Muhammad (saws) said that "Allah will ask people on the Day of Judgment how they utilized their youth"

[Tirmidhi]

Explanation : If the life of this world is an illusion, the period of greatest illusion occurs during youth. It is a period of high energy and great enthusiasm, coupled with an air of invincibility and perpetuity. For this reason there are special warnings for the youth and glad tidings for the person who uses this energy wisely.

The great task of Muslim youth is to bring the life-giving message of Islam to wherever they live. With love, dedication, wisdom, and insight.

The person who devoted his youth to the worship of Allah will be among the selected seven kinds of people for whom Allah will provide His shade on the day when there will be no shade except His shade. [Bukahri, Muslim]

'Generation gap' is a clever term that aims at giving scientific respectability to rudeness and rebellion. The idea is to create a wedge between generations and make it look acceptable for a young person to be indifferent to any wise counsel from one's close and well-wishing elders. Which reminds us of the special challenge faced by the youth today. While temptations have always been strong in young age, today the problem is magnified by mega efforts targeting the youth, especially the Muslim youth in the Western world, at all levels including intellectual and philosophical.

A favorite theme of these campaigns is to separate Islam from its culture. When in France, follow the French culture not the Muslim Algerian one, so the argument goes. This argument needs to be carefully deconstructed. Like all clever arguments this one also begins with a bit of truth. It is true that Islam is a universal religion and not restricted to a particular region. It is also true that many Muslim lands, during their period of decline, developed or adopted some cultural practices that were not based in Islam and need to be pruned. Certainly, not everything that has become accepted social practice in every Muslim country is Islamic. But it is a very long jump from there to conclude that everything being done in the Muslim world is un-Islamic and must be jettisoned. And it is even more bizarre to suggest that the replacement of all that with the pop-culture is just fine.

When Islam reached the lands that today form the Muslim world, it influenced the life style and cultural practices there without forcing a monoculture.

The propaganda machine presents this common core of Islamic culture as a great burden, but one only needs to look at the unfortunate millions who are left on their own in the name of freedom, to ascertain the truth.

Hence the profound advice in another famous hadith to value five things: "Youth before old age, health before sickness, wealth before poverty, free time before preoccupation, and life before death."