Become a Da'i Parent
Learn the most essential skills that will help you achieve your parenting goals quickly.
Don’t get me wrong.
I am not asking you to go out there and start scouting for the “infidels” and try to convert them to Islam. I am not asking you to go out there to every conference to deliver talks and get paid thousands of dollars. I am not asking you to go out there to start fighting political battles.
What I’m asking you to do simply is become the spiritual guide of your child. Focus all your dawah towards the worldly and celestial success of this gift of God to you.
Whatever you would have your children become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversations. — Lydia H. Sigourney
Start with yourself. Improve and mend your own character.
A well-trained child is the most valuable legacy you can give to the world.
Remember, though, you can’t just raise and train a child that smoothly. There are hurdles you will have to cross to achieve success.
You may be a part of the hurdles.
Sometimes, the child you are raising is the problem. Other times, the environment is the problem.
And it is frustrating when your child and the environment compete against you. Even then, you still can win… a tough battle.
How to Make Dawah Work for Your Parenting
The job of a dawah worker is to make people understand Islam so beautifully that they fall in love with it.
It doesn’t matter if they are not going to embrace Islam. But to get them to care about its teachings so much that they want to adopt those teachings in their own lives.
As a da’i parent, though, there is an extra for you here. You actually want your child to not only love Islam but to embrace it fully till their last day.
And you will have to be forward-thinking to achieve that. Because the Prophet (saw) said:
Every child is born on the fitrah. It is the parents that make it a Jew, Christian or idol worshipper.
This simply tells you that you must prepare to train your child right before s/he is born. And that is for every child.
The experiences you used in training your firstborn might be utterly different from those you need to train your last child. Time changes, and the realities of life change with it.
Part of preparation is to understand what is going on in your community before your child is born. What can you do to mitigate the adverse social problems that can affect the Islam of your unborn child before they become adolescents and afterward?
Got the idea?
If you can get other Muslim parents to work with your idea, you will be planning the future of an unborn generation of conscious and productive Muslims, the future vanguards of Islam.
I am sure you already know that's your job, right?
But how can you do that?
Become a Master of Persuasion
Why?
Because as a da'i parent, your job is to convince people about the benefits of the promises of Islam. Since you are not the only person interested in the future of your child, you need to design a better and winning plan you will sell to others. That’s how you can protect the Islam of your kids.
You have the government wanting to make your child into an ideal citizen according to their own programs.
You have many service providers in your community holding their own ideas of how a human being should live life.
These service providers include teachers, artists, movie producers and their stars, sports addicts, media people, as well as various opinion leaders out there.
Then you have your kids themselves and their own ideas of how they want to live their lives. This is a great pain if you have not done your homework before the child comes of age.
Your main goal for developing your persuasion skills is to get all these stakeholders to adopt your approach to human development.
Now you understand that you need this skill to move other Muslim parents in your block into getting involved in designing the future of their children.
Together with them, you can influence a customised educational curriculum for your child’s generation.
With this group, you can easily collaborate with like-mended service providers like novelists, cartoonists, TV producers, scriptwriters and media owners to create the foundation of a dedicated educational system for your children.
How do you enlist the services of these professionals without persuading them? It’s even more challenging if they are not Muslims. If, however, they are Muslims, that’s great because they may not find it odd to contribute to the future of their own civilisation.
How to Develop the Skills of Persuasion
If you want to achieve your parenting goals successfully, you can’t do so without persuasion. It is a necessary skill you need to influence the behaviours of your kids and those involved in designing their social and psychological environment.
With just some effort and practice, you can develop these skills. You already possess it without knowing. To effectively use it, however, you have to be conscious of it.
Your first step in developing your persuasion skills in this internet era is to learn copywriting.
And you can learn it from some very good books. Copywriting is a marketing skill. It has been defined as “salesmanship in writing”.
Now, why should you learn this skill if it is for marketers?
Don’t forget. You are also a marketer. But instead of selling tangible things, you are selling ideas. You are selling the promises of Islam to your kids and everybody who shows interest in moulding them.
Know this for sure:
The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice. — Peggy Omara.
If you are ready to become the engineer of the future of your children by being an active participant in their moral and intellectual formation, start considering yourself as a marketer. And that’s what all dawah workers are, too. We market Islam.
Developing your persuasion skills will also help you improve your ability to express yourself as an expert parent so that you can get other parents to know, like, and trust you. Without these three things, you can’t transform people's lives.
Recommended Learning Resources
A few resources I’d recommend you read to learn the basics of copywriting are:
How to Write Better Copy by Steve Harrison
Architecture of Persuasion by Michael Masterson
Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Anything you can learn at Copyblogger, especially their free Smart Marketer membership resources.
These are primarily resources by non-Muslims. Study them, take notes, and adapt them to your needs. Cover the “non” and use the nonsense in those resources to your advantage.
Separate yourself from the folds of those Muslim parents who are always complaining about how corrupt their society is but do nothing to improve it. Don’t wait for a chance to make things right. Create that chance and do the right thing.
Remember: You are not managing an inconvenience. You are raising a human being. — Kattie Frantz
Once you master the skill, you will always see problems differently.
Your ability to communicate your message and convince others to adopt your point of view without forcing or manipulating them will help you achieve your goal quicker than expected. You must be able to persuade others both in writing and speaking effectively.
Writing is the most powerful way to do dawah today. Everybody has a phone in their pocket. You don't have to knock at doors today to pass your message across physically.
And remember that all these efforts you put into your parenting are your way of investing in the life Allah gave you, as I explained in the first letter of this series. It is your way of improving that life by scaling it into multiple lives as a way of showing gratitude to Allah and perpetuating His will on earth.
In the next letter, I'll dive deep into the four major projects that Muslim parents in every community must realise to ensure the protection and enhancement of the Islamic identity of the future generation of Muslims they are raising.
Talk to you soon, in sha Allah.
Teslim
The Muslimchangemaker
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