How do I protect my children from LGBTQI+ influences?
Q. I pray this finds you well. I hope that my three young children will benefit from your courses when they are older, inshaAllah. Please make dua that Allah fills their hearts with love for Him and His Messenger (upon him be blessings and peace).
My question is this: What can we do, as parents, to protect our children from the growing tide of LGBTQI+ influences, especially if we have family members who openly identify as gay and Muslim? Is a tendency towards homosexuality something that can be prevented during the formative years?
1. Make Du`a
The first step is to realize that it is not you who protects them; Allah Most High is the one who protects them. He has placed your children in your hands and made you responsible to raise them. Your role is to fulfill your responsibility with the conviction that the outcome that you hope for is entirely in His hands.
This realization should give you hope. The social pressures that pull our children away from Allah Most High’s commands can seem daunting. But He is the one who is running everything. He created those social pressures so that we might realize our neediness, turn to Him in supplication, and place our trust in Him.
So before you do anything else, develop a regular routine of making du`a for your children, particularly at those times when supplications are answered, such as in the last third of the night, after the adhan, before and after every obligatory prayer, after completing one’s recitation of the Qur’an, and on Fridays (which contain a moment in which every supplication is answered).
2. Make a Happy Home
After you make du`a, the first thing that you must do to protect your children from LGBTQI+ influences is to make a happy home. That means that you need to have a happy marriage. You, your husband, and your children need to be each other’s best friends. You need to take time out for each other. You need to have delicious meals together. You need to go on outings together. You need to share stories together. You need to laugh together. These happy memories of growing up with a biological mother, a biological father, and biological siblings will stay with your children forever and naturally lead them to search for their own future happiness in marriage and family.
If, on the other hand, you and your husband are frequently at odds with each other, if you are frequently upset with your children, or if you are all too busy to spend time with each other, then your children will search for their future happiness elsewhere. We all want to do what makes us happy, and our children are no different. If they don’t find happiness in marriage and family, they will be more easily convinced that their happiness lies in an LGBTQI+ lifestyle.
3. Train Your Children to Think Religiously
Let’s think for a moment. Why do we want to protect our children from LGBTQI+ influences? Some of us might answer, “Because LGBTQI lifestyles are distasteful and repulsive.” That is not the right answer. Our goal as religious parents is to teach our children to avoid whatever Allah Most High has forbidden, regardless of whether they find it attractive or distasteful. The reason why we want to protect our children from LGBTQI+ influences is simply that Allah Most High has made LGBTQI+ lifestyles unlawful.
We need to train our children to think religiously. We need to train them so that before they do anything, they inquire about the divine command. If they find that it is something that Allah Most High has commanded, they do it. And if they find that it is something He has forbidden, they shun it. The name for this kind of thinking is called godfearingness (in Arabic, taqwa). Godfearingness is your children’s greatest protection against LGBTQI+ influences.
If you have a happy home, teaching your children godfearingness is easy—just have it yourself! If you have a happy home, and you make it into an environment where the commands of Allah Most High are venerated, then that is what your children will naturally do themselves. What does this mean practically? It means that you and your husband need to love to pray, to love to send blessings on the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), to love to learn about your religion, to love to attend religious gatherings, to love to give charity, to love to help other people, to love to keep ties with your parents, to love to be someone who Allah Most High is pleased with. If you think and behave religiously with your children, and your children love your company, they will naturally incline towards thinking and behaving religiously themselves.
You can then strengthen this natural inclination by teaching them to repent to Allah Most High for their misdeeds and by teaching them to ask Allah Most High to guide them. You would teach them to do this is by choosing an expression of repentance or a supplication for guidance and then saying it with them every day as they go to bed (if you couple this with an enjoyable moment just before they go to bed, such as a story or a conversation, it will be even more effective).
4. Normalize Religiously-Gendered Behaviour
As you teach your children to measure their actions against God’s commands and prohibitions, teach them that Allah Most High created men and women differently and that He has commanded us to uphold those differences. These differences fall into one of two categories: (1) differences that He has obligated us to uphold and (2) differences that He has encouraged us to uphold.
(1) The differences that He has obligated us to uphold are are those that return to distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine behaviour. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) forbade men from behaving like women and women from behaving like men (Bukhari). Scholars explain that there are distinctively feminine ways to dress (such as wearing a skirt) and distinctively masculine ways to dress (such as wearing a suit and a tie). For a woman to dress in a distinctively masculine way or for a man to dress in a distinctively feminine way is unlawful. Similarly, there are certain manners of walking that are distinctively feminine (such as swaying side-to-side as one walks) and other manners of walking that are distinctively masculine (such as a military march). For a woman to walk in a distinctively masculine way or for a man to walk in a distinctively feminine way is unlawful. These differences all return to the social norms of a gendered society (the social norms of a non-gendered society are of no consequence). Other differences are religiously mandated. These include wearing silk clothing, gold jewelry, or applying henna to one’s hands, which are all distinctively feminine, or leading the congregational prayer, which is distinctively masculine. The different roles and responsibilities of the husband and wife in marriage are also religiously mandated.
(2) The differences that He has encouraged us to uphold are other kinds of behaviour that, while not distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine, are nevertheless religiously more appropriate for men or for women. For example, it is womanly to speak in a soft voice, to be shy, to perform household tasks such as cooking food, to take care of young children, to wear beautiful clothes, to keep one’s hair long, and to beautify one’s body. On the other hand, it is manly to take responsibility, to protect those under one’s charge, to earn a living, to buy the groceries, and to be self-reliant. These differences will not always be upheld, either because of differing natures of particular men or women, or because of special life circumstances, such as the need to have more than one household income.
Live these differences in your happy and religious home. You should be a model religious wife and your spouse should be a model religious husband. If you have a boy, dress him like a boy and raise him with manly qualities, and if you have a girl, dress her like a girl and raise her with womanly qualities. Make religiously-gendered behaviour a normal part of their happy life at home.
5. Educate Them
If you want to protect your children from LGBTQI+ influences, you have to take charge of their education. That means that you have to religiously prepare them to respond with religious confidence when they are exposed to those influences in the future.
When your children are young (from when they begin to understand what you are saying until they are about 12 or 13 years old), fill their minds with stories from the life of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), his Companions, and righteous people who followed them. Teach them who Allah Most High is, who His messengers are, what He has commanded us to do, and what will happen after we die. Teach them the Quran. Teach them the hadiths of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). Teach them Sacred Law (fiqh). As you tell them all of these things, emphasize religiously-gendered roles, tell them about the people of the Prophet Lot (upon him be peace), and proactively bring out tidbits that run contrary to the LGBTQI+ worldview. It is important that as much of this religious education as possible comes from you in their happy home. Don’t make the mistake of delegating all of their religious education to other people. You are the greatest influence on your children.
As they get older and hit the teenage years, they need a more rigorous religious education that complements what they learn in their conventional high-school education. Here, you may need help educating your children. The Young Adults curriculum at Basira Education has been designed to fill this need, and you may want to check it out.
6. Talk to Them
It goes without saying that you should guard your children from LGBTQI+ influences as much as you can. That means that you need to control what they are reading in books, what they are watching on screens (in an ideal situation, they shouldn’t have very much screen-time at all), and what they are hearing from their friends and relatives. But the way to control what your children read, watch, or hear is not just to tell them, “You’re not allowed to do that.” If you do that, they will be on the other side. They will grudgingly comply when you are watching and then do what they want when you turn away. Rather, the way to control what your children read, watch, or hear is to talk to them so that they are on your side.
First, you have to tell them what an LGBTQI+ lifestyle is. You have to tell them this before they hear about it from anyone else. Then, you have to tell them that people choose this kind of a lifestyle because they think that it will make them happy. Perhaps the reason why they think that is that they never had a happy home as children. Or perhaps they had a negative experience with someone of the opposite sex. Or perhaps there is some other reason. Then, tell them that happiness lies in living according to the divine command. (If you have a happy and religious home, this is something that they will grasp easily without much explanation.) Finally, tell them that if they spend time with people who live according to the divine command, they will be motivated to do the same, and if they spend time with people who don’t live according to the divine command, they will be motivated to do the opposite. Entertaining oneself by reading, watching, or hearing about someone who lives an LGBTQI+ lifestyle will reduce their veneration for the divine command. (This is part of a larger principle that applies to entertaining oneself by reading, watching, or hearing about someone who does other acts of disobedience as well.)
Talk to your children the harms of an LGBTQI+ lifestyle. Find a real-life story of someone who adopted that lifestyle and lived an unhappy life, and then share that story with them. Share statistics of harms and unhappiness that come from living that kind of lifestyle.
If they happen to watch an advertisement that shows a child being raised by two fathers, talk to your children and tell them that the child that they see didn’t really come from those two fathers—he came from a mother and a father who is likely not one of the two fathers that they see. That child is therefore not living with his natural mother and father and the natural motherly and fatherly love that your child experiences is absent from his life.
7. Prepare Them For Marriage
In a religious culture, sexual fulfillment is found between spouses in the privacy of their homes. In our modern culture, sexual desire is out in the open. All of our interactions in the public sphere are somehow tainted by some kind of sexual desire—images, advertising, music, movies, games, fashion, media, restaurants, malls—sexual desire is everywhere.
The sexual desire is the most powerful desire that Allah Most High has created within us and He has only permitted us to fulfill it through marriage. The culture that surrounds our children, however, constantly stimulates this powerful desire within them and then tempts them to fulfill it through means that Allah Most High has forbidden—by looking at images, watching movies, developing romantic relationships, and, in the worst cases, committing adultery. The fulfillment of sexual desires with the same sex through any of these means is an extreme manifestation of this larger problem.
The late Shaykh Mulla Ramadan al-Bouti (Allah have mercy on him) used to believe that a father who knows that his son needs to get married is obliged to help him get married. He used to cite a hadith narrated by al-Bayhaqi in which the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) is reported to have said, “Whoever has a son should give him a good name and teach him good behaviour. When his son reaches puberty, he should help him get married. If he reaches puberty but his father doesn’t help him get married and this leads him to commit a sin, then the responsibility of that sin lies with his father.” Many scholars have judged this hadith to be weak, but Shaykh Mulla believed that it was part of the guidance that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) had left behind. He would cite this hadith to his son, the late Shaykh Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Bouti (Allah have mercy on him) as he helped him find a wife and get married when he was only eighteen years old.
Marriage requires maturity and responsibility, and that happens at different ages for different people. Shaykh Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Bouti was ready for marriage when he was eighteen. That might not be the case with your children. The point here is that you should be aware that sexual desires are part of the human condition and the wisdom for which they have been created within us is to drive is to marriage. Protecting our children means that we need to be a means of facilitating their marriages as soon as they are ready to get married.
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