Points of connection for Muslim students
“She had heard her grandmother tell of being put in a tub of ice cold Damascus spring water to bring down her fever when she was a child.” - “Laysa laha min dooni lahi kashifa.” - This is actually a verse from the Qur’an (53:58) - Sophia is using this in an appropriate context, the book translates it as “remove this” because that seemingly fits the context better but the word kashif in Arabic really means to “disclose” or to “reveal” and “it” refers to what inevitably comes to mankind: death, and thereon his judgement before God. So the verse is one of many reminding mankind that The Day of Judgement is coming and no one but God can bring it about (or, for that matter, delay it) and this is why it is said in a moment like Sophia is in here. It acts as a reminder that death will come to all of us, and while we (like Sophia) might make our best efforts to avert it for ourselves or other, those efforts are ultimately reliant on God’s will. This is an action packed chapter in which Sophia emerges as a hero. There are not too many particular Muslim matters in it that have not been already pointed out in the previous chapter guides. However, be sure to use the PowerPoint slides beginning after the slide that says chapter 14, there are many visuals there that can aid student comprehension.
Points of connection for Muslim students
Page 155 ““It wasn’t her fault she’d been dumped in the middle of a place where there were no Muslims, and she had no idea when or if she’d ever get back home.” - This approaches an interesting type of questions that Muslims are confronted with from time to time (granted perhaps not to the extent that Sophia has having here, whisked away to the past as she is) where contextually it is very difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill an obligation or preferable deed based purely on the context one is in, to no fault of one’s own. But it is a fair question, What should Sophia try to do here? Should she abstain from marrying Mathew even though she has a crush on him and it is a near impossibility she will find a marriageable Muslim man where she is? Should she try to get Mathew to convert to Islam so she can marry him? Should she just go ahead and marry him? etc. Another important point about Muslims that I believe often contributes to a certain cultural gap students and Muslims in the west experience. I believe it is fair to say that love and romance between people is not quite as honored (or romanticized if you will) as it is in the West; and this is more true the more religious a Muslim is. Islam teaches to love God above all else, even one’s spouse and family. This of course does not mean that you do not love them or love your friends or love others, however, Islam instructs the Muslims to love them “for the sake of Allah” and a marriage and family are to be vehicles for serving God and worshipping him on earth. This is all to say that romantic connection and union is not the end-all purpose and goal of life via an Islamic outlook on life; I believe this is less-so in the West where the virtually the whole of cultural output in music, movies, poems, literature etc. will revolve around the goal of attaining romantic love. “She believed that God rewards those who sacrifice for their faith, and that a believer is blessed when they are thankful in plenty and forebearing through trials.” - The book seems to have misspelled “forbearing” here, aside form that this is a perfect articulation of teachings that are lucid in Islam. She could say patience instead of forbearing. The word for patience and forbearance in Islam is sabr (in Somali the same word is used often, there are Somali and Arabic names rooted from this word such as Sabir and Sabreen), the injunction to be patient is related throughout the Qur’an. 19th century terms: The Fugitive Slave Act Summary- Points of connection for Muslim students Page 127 “Here, July Fourth was a huge celebration…” - The celebration of holidays like the Fourth of July is something that there is a wide range of outlooks on from Muslims. There is plenty of evidence within Islam to suggest that it is forbidden to celebrate any holiday that is not one of the two Islamic holidays, of which this hadith of the Prophet Muhammad is at the center - and it is correct to say that Islam forbids these celebrations. Nevertheless, in the modern world the celebration of national holidays is something very widely compromised on by Muslims. Pretty much all Muslim countries have a national holiday, even Saudi Arabia which is the most conservative of Muslim countries. My experience with Muslims in America is that most of them stay away from celebrating the Fourth of July, yet I also know Muslims who have hosted fourth of July get togethers and celebrations at their homes, and I have known other Muslims who grew up not celebrating it but then as an adult went to fireworks displays with non-Muslim friends and acquaintances etc. I believe it is generally fair to say that the less acculturated a Muslims or Muslim family is to American life the less likely they are to celebrate this holiday, but at the same time I know people who are third generation Muslims who do not celebrate this holiday out of religious conviction. Per my experience it is also safe to say that the Fourth of July (and maybe Thanksgiving) are looked at a little softer than Halloween, Christmas, and Easter; these three holidays celebrate things at their center that are very antithetical to Islam’s core doctrines. Page 129 “Muslims wore stocking feet when they were in the mosque, but this was different.” - Muslims will of course not wear shoes in the mosque (masjid) so as to keep the carpeting clean where people pray. It is not really accurate to say they wear "stocking feet" as whether or not you wear socks in the mosque just depends on whether or not you had socks on underneath your shoes. If you are wearing sandals in the summer you will have bare feet in the mosque and often times people will take their socks off even if they are wearing them because you have to wash the feet before praying (with some exception). Page 135 "Who knew that freedom could be trumped by practical considerations" - so see that practicality, even when faced with injustice, is being played on as a bit of theme here. This relates to Islamic concepts of rectifying affairs of evil as was explained in the Chapter 11 study guide. There is a connection to be made between all this and Mr. William's character as we are about to learn more about him. Page 137 "her mid-day prayer" - this is the prayer that is called asr. "her mid-day prayer" - this is the prayer that is called asr.
"'Are you…a Muslim?" - so a huge thing is being revealed about Mr. William here (though again, I don't like the author's connecting it to him somehow having a accent that is similar to what she has heard from East Africans before in the 20th century). Within this part is a huge learning opportunity and connecting to slaves in America who were Muslim. One such person was a man named Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, there is a picture of him in the PowerPoint along with a map that shows where in Africa slaves were mostly taken from to America. It can be see on that map that the northern most part of it was what is today Senegal. Senegal is about 92% Muslim. So slaves taken from there were likely to have been Muslims. There is more on African Muslim slaves in America here. Of course most of them would have lost their religion through being enslaved. But not all did and ibn Sori is an interesting example because he was a prince and was able to read and write Arabic and was eventually sent back home at the behest of the king of Morocco. The story that Mr. William gives about his life seems to be partly inspired by this story. Another thing to note about the map. It is interesting that the United States transatlantic slave trade has its northern tip at Senegal. North of Senegal is the country of Mauritania. Mauritania is the western most Arab country in the world and has a long history of practicing slavery itself, it was actually the last country on earth to officially ban slavery, though it is said to still be practiced there extrajudicially, and it as an institution it is heavily embedded into the tribal structures of the country. It is a point that might need further looking into, but I believe part of the reason that slaves were not taken from north of Senegal is 1.) race - Senegal is where people just start being a lot more black, and it is well known that Europeans viewed blacks as an inferior race/species and 2.) to reap slaves from Arab west Africa would be to meddle in an already well established slavery system, and therefore resistance to it might be greater, in addition to the fact that these countries (Mauritania and Morocco) traditionally had closer relations with Europe and the Muslim empires. All this is to point out that the Muslim world itself, though here victimized by slavery in places like Senegal, is not guilt free by any means from the instituting slavery. If you have Somali students, the Bantu tribe in Somalia has long been a slave class of people, there are some Somali-Bantu refugees in the United States but most Somalis in the US are not Bantu. It is not uncommon to hear Somali students in America (I have heard this much) use Bantu as a pejorative towards one another (not that they are making fun of a Somali who is Bantu but they are using the word Bantu to mock someone). This is a remnant of something sinister, for many of our Somali students it is fair to say that they are much more likely to have come from families whose recent ancestors owned slaves vs. being slaves themselves (unless they are Bantu Somalis). This also raises a whole other question about how these students are to figure out their own relating to the history of slavery in the United States - wherein they are black people but are not descended from slaves, and are perhaps descended from slave owners in their own right, and on the other hand they are Muslim, where Islam discourages slavery (but does not make its forbiddance mandatory) and Muslims have been both victims and perpetrators of slavery. “Ya Allah! Tehki Arabi?” - “Tehki Arabi” is a colloquial way of asking if someone speaks Arabic. If you have non-Arab Muslim students who have taken some Arabic classes in mosques they will likely know the more standardized way of saying it, “takalam Arabi?” Summary - Sophia is overwhelmed and grieves. There is a question about stages of grief and Huck Finn in the questionnaire in the student materials. Points of connection for Muslim students Page 118 “What does your religion say about slavery?” - Religion was actually central to the debate about slavery at the time, Mark Twain alludes to this in Huck Finn when Huck decides that “he’ll go to hell then” if that is what freeing slave means (as he has been told) - For more about how religion was used to define slavery see here, to read about how religion inspired abolitionists see here, The topic of slavery in Islam is boiled down pretty well by Sophia here in the book. However, Arab Muslim empires long oversaw expansive slave trades, but the advent of Islam is widely recognized in academia as an event that curtailed slavery. Here is a Muslim narrative on the matter, and to delve much more deeper into the matter see here, and here the BBC has an explanation of “How Islam Moderated Slavery” “I meant what does your religion say to do when you see evil being committed?” - and Sophia explains what Islam says about this by relaying what is said in a famous Hadith by the Prophet Muhammad. This Hadith is cited in Islamic teaching as evidence for a Muslim's duty to "enjoin the good and forbid the evil" (see verse 3:104 of the Qur'an also). An important point of the Hadith is that the Prophet specifies "if you are unable to do so" which indicates the practicality with which a Muslim is suppose to approach matters and the judgement and deliberation they are suppose to exercise in choose a course of action that has a definite good and will not lead to a greater evil, the concept of which is called maslaha in Islam. They are many more evidences for this, but it is an important point to make because there are Muslims who go to extremes in what they deem be "enjoining the good and forbidding the wrong" without exercising this type of judgment and ascertaining what they are actually "able to do" of good and they end of doing much greater harm. It may be an interesting question to ask later on in the book whether or not Sophia exercised good judgement in what she was able to do of enjoying the good. Page 119
“Methodist services because half the time the sermons are about abolishing slavery." - Remember often times Muslim students may not know the differences between Christian denominations and may the terms that denominate then may not be familiar to them. Suffice it to point out that Methodists, or Methodism, was a branch of Christianity (can mention they were Protestant if you think they have that in their background knowledge, if they have studied the colonial period of the US before they will probably have some familiarity with Protestantism as a concept) started in the late 18th century by a man named John Wesley who was strongly abolitionist and believe Christians needed to really focus on having good character. It can be mentioned that many blacks became Methodist Christians also. The Jordans are likely Baptist, being from the south, and there were both Methodists and Baptists on all sides of the slavery question. Page 120 “She was showing the strength and fortitude that her hardships had bred in her.” - this sort of shows Sophia reading some Islamic traits into Abbey, as it articulates what the purpose of hardship is by Islamic teaching. It can be a worthwhile question to ask students if they agree that hardships can make a person stronger, and if they have seen this in their lives or in their family's life. I think they, like most people, will agree with this precept (and when they do agree with it you can joke that if that is the case you will give them very hard tests to make them stronger students!) "They seemed just as far fetched" - now notice here that Sophia is deliberating and weighing what she can and cannot do realistically. Page 132 "Sophia had never seen a drunk person before" - Having been screened from being around drunk people or people drinking is something an experience that it is not at all unlikely your Muslim students share. Islam of course prohibits drinking. It is lesser known and understood that Islam also prohibits socializing with people who are drinking or sitting at a table where alcohol is present. For many Muslims the first time they witness people drunk it is an experience that strikes at their sensitivities. Bleeding Kansas Resoure
Summary- Sophia meets Mr. William, a slave owned by the Jordan family who will also be a pivotal character, and comes to realize that the time and place she is in is Bleeding Kansas. Chapter 10 should mostly be devoted to making students understand this historical context. Points of connection for Muslim students “Something that sounded lilting and familiar” - this “lilting” of Mr. William’s accent is going to be related to Sophia having heard similar accents before from Muslim friends she knew from Somalia and Sudan. A “lilting” accent is one that goes up and down in intonation (the word comes from ‘lute’) it is commonly used to describe Irish accents. I am not expert enough to say for sure really but I believe the author is mistaken in attributing this feature to a Somali accent, the way that Somalis often enunciate Arabic phrases can differ from Arabs in that it often devoids certain words of accentuation where there ought to be, to me this lens itself to being less lilting. Also, it is going to turn out that Mr. William is from Senegal in West Africa and to brush a broad stroke and say that Somalis, Sudanese, and Senegalese all have a shared feature in their accents that can be so easily identified seems to be brushing too broad a stroke to me. Further, the speech patterns of Mr. William seem to be modeled to a certain degree after Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - there are of course linguistics who attribute the features of African American accents of English to the origins of West African languages but coalescing this with Sudanese and Somali does not seem right to me. Summary-
Points of connection for Muslim students Page 105 “In my religion, when someone dies we say, ‘Inna li lahi wa inna alaihi rajaun.’ It means, ‘From God we come, and to Him we return.’” “Sophia gulped. She wasn’t prepared for a question like this." Shoes a real anxiety that a Muslim can have about teaching their religion to other people. Speaking about the religion incorrectly is explicitly forbidden in the Quran (Say (O Muhammad): ‘(But) indeed the things that my Lord has forbidden are al-Fawaahish (lewd, evil sins of every kind) whether committed openly or secretly, al-Ithm (sins of all kinds), ath-Thulm (unrighteous oppression), joining partners (in worship) with Allah for which He has sent down no authority for, and that you speak about Allah that which you have no knowledge of.'” [al-A’raaf: 33] "Heaven or hell" - Muslims often use the word "heaven" when describing the ambitions that Islam inculcates for arrival in the hereafter because heaven is the word most often used by Christians. However, the Arabic word jennah, is more accurately translated to paradise, and jennah or paradise is how Islam and Muslims conceptualize the beneficial resting place in the hereafter. The Arabic word that is translated into heaven most often is samawat (heavens) which means skies that are above the earth, so literally the blue sky above us and the celestial skies of outer space that we see above us. The heavens (samawat) in Islam exist as signs I God's greatness and benevolence that are visible to man in his earthly life, whereas jennah is the abode in the next life that the Muslim strives to attain. "When small children die…" - what Sophia says here about the belief that when Children die they do not have to answer for their sins is correct, and this is the belief in Islam concerning Muslim children and non-Muslim children. Page 106 "When Prophet Moses, upon him be peace" - it is part of the etiquette of Islamic speech that whenever a Prophet's names is mentioned peace is wished upon them. Now, this is bringing about a pretty cool part in this book. Sophia is about to tell Abbey a Qur'anic story about Moses. This story is told in the 18th chapter of the Qur'an which is entitled Surat al-khaf (the chapter of the cave). There is a very good chance the Muslim students know this story and have a familiarity with it. It is part of Islamic practice for a Muslim to read this chapter from the Qur'an every Friday before the Friday congregation (jummah). So it is a famous story from the Qur'an and is a story that encapsulates an important essence of the Islamic belief of qadr (predestination, or Providence) in that it illustrates the "God works in mysterious ways" concept or the concept that what we know of the occurrences in our lives is but small knowledge in the grand scheme of what God has written for us. Another key lesson of the story is that if man's propensity towards impatience. Moses, greatest amongst men as one of God's great Prophets as he is, still wants to know from the wise man (whose name is khidr - which means green - and also, the wise man is not a man in the sense of being a earthly creature, he is a mystical being sent by God to take Moses on this journey as part of his training for his Prophetic mission) immediately the reasons for what he does, despite that he agreed not to. So it is part of Islamic practice and the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad to read this story and the chapter belongs to once a week; this works as a constant reminder to Muslims of God's omniscience and power, and that there is wisdom to his all-encompassing decree even when it entails what is perceptibly "good things happening to bad people" or "bad things happening to good people" Moses BTW is called Musa in Arabic and this is rendered as Muse often times in Somali families. "He is the Best of Planners" - This is a phrase and reminder about God that Muslims give to one another frequently. It is a phrase taken directly from the Qur'an (3:54 & 8:30). I have found Christians frequently say to one another "God has a plan" but Muslims will say "Allahu khayr ul-mākireen" meaning "Allah is the best of Planners" |