How Basira Was Born and What it Has Become

assalamu `alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh

I launched Basira just under six months ago today. But that's not how Basira began. Basira began years before its launch out of my desire to educate my own children. That desire grew into a desire to educate my friends' children. And that then grew into Basira. 

In the years before I launched Basira, I noticed a gap in my children's education. Over the previous decade, Allah Most High had given me the opportunity to teach, collaborate, and learn from students of all kinds of backgrounds--from children to grandparents, from stay-at-home moms to working professionals, and from young students still in school to older and more mature students in undergraduate and graduate programs, even professors. As I worked with my students, I noticed a conflict in their minds. I described that conflict yesterday in an online webinar. If you missed that webinar, please listen to its recording in order to understand what that conflict is and how it can be removed.

I wanted to educate my own children and my friends' children in order to preempt that conflict before it appeared. I wanted to prepare my children and my friend's children by nurturing their minds and hearts with religious clarity, religious conviction, and religious confidence before they were exposed to the confusions and doubts of the materialism and humanism that would be embedded in their school and college education (I talked about this materialism and humanism in yesterday's webinar -- you can listen here to its recording). I love teaching children and my life circumstances pushed me to turn this small local children's education project into a global children's education project through Basira. 

That's how it all began.

But now it's becoming something else.

Although I launched Basira to educate children, a significant percentage of the students who registered were adults. And the adults were often more thirsty for what I and my colleague Tabraze Azam were teaching than the children! Over the course of the first Basira semester, I had many conversations with these adult students, as well as many conversations with the teen students' parents, and I realized two things. 

First, I realized that the need for adults to resolve the conflict in their minds was greater than the need for children resolve the conflict -- the conflict in the minds of children, particularly children of religious parents like all of you, is still in the making. But the conflict in the minds of adults who have never had the chance to integrate their school and college education into an intelligent Islamic worldview, the conflict in the minds of these adults has been fully formed and, in some cases, is active and religiously debilitating. Adults need to resolve that conflict more than children do.

Second, I realized that the children who I love to teach will only learn if their parents learn alongside them. The conversations that they had with me last semester -- about arguments for God's existence, about atheism, about evolution, about Christianity, about Buddhism, about life -- these conversations need to happen at home too. The children need to sit down at the dinner table with their parents and talk to them about the world around them and work with them to fit it all into an intelligent Islamic worldview. And in order for that to happen, parents need to learn too.

That is why Basira is becoming a place for adults as well as for teens. This semester, we are launching four courses for adults: (1) our flagship course Why Islam is True (for Adults), (2 & 3) an advanced course in Hanafi fiqh and another advanced course in Shafii fiqh (I will insha'allah tell you more about these courses in a separate message), and (4) a parenting course called Raising Religious Children. 

(But just like last semester, adults are still welcome to register for a course that is offered in the teens program that hasn't yet made its way into the adults program, such as Muslim Character and Modern Culture, The Prophet's Proofs in Mecca, or The Sacred Law of Contracts, Inheritance, International Relations, and Government).

Basira is slowly turning into a family seminary. I will insha'allah tell you more about that another month or two. 

I request your prayers for tawfiq.

With salams,

Hamza.