Judul : sun moon yoga ann arbor
link : sun moon yoga ann arbor
sun moon yoga ann arbor
my name is lauren ve director here at rudolf steinercollege and today represents a dream come true, i was able to live in egypt fora year when i was
sun moon yoga ann arbor, 21, and made many dear friendsand connections with my muslim friends in cairo and when 9/11 happened it wasabsolutely heart breaking to me to see the flames of hatred and
racism being ignited here inour country against our muslim friends,brothers, and sisters and i really feel like, as awaldorf educator that we have a world class education system.it is a classic education based on childdevelopment, and we go throughall of the classic cultures and religious practices, and what morebeautiful thing to do then to have whenwe are studying islam to havean authentic representation from our islamicfriends, and
as a couple presenters in the audience have said theyhave been asked many times togo to waldorf 6th grade classroomsand to teach about islam and so, this was born out ofthis impulse of how can we helpwaldorf educators bring a moreauthentic representation. we're callingthis a cultural competence event and i have had emails frompeople saying, well why don'tyou have something on buddhism or zoroastrianism or the jewish faith, and i am hopingthat people from those faiths
will come forward and offerwhat we have been sobeautifully gifted to today. this whole event is madepossible by the generous support of kaismenoufy, an egyptian businessman who's here in sacramento, andto kais we extend our great and warm thanks.unfortunately he can't be withus here today because his daughter is gettingmarried, right? and then in theback rafat alafranji. he is a parent atsacramento waldorf school, he is the brain child behind allof this, and his beautiful wife lisa over here. and so we arevery excited. and they havelena
who is going into 6th gradethis year, so this is timely as well. so, this event, thereason for it is two fold. one is for waldorfeducators that might have amuslim child in their class room. howcan they understand thedifferent practices and beliefs that thefamily brings to the table at any grade level, and theother is to authentically work through the medievalhistory that is covered in thewaldorf curriculum in the middle school years. so, i would like to then introduceour two
key notes. we have jihad turk,would you mind standing up fora minute jihad? and he is president of the ofthe claremont bayan islamic seminary which isembedded in the claremontcolleges in southern california. andthen we have anjum mir and she teaches parent childclasses at the westside waldorf school. she has done that forthe last 10 years, and she isanother one thats been asked to come intothe 6th grade and teach aboutislam so, the last two years she hasactually co-teaching the mainlesson blocks with the 6th gradeteachers there.
so without any further adiue,i'd like to invite jihad up andwe will go from there. thank you. and anjum. hello everyone. good morning. and thank you all for beinghere. its such a privilege forboth jihad and i to be here and tobe able to do something together as a couple. its kinda the thing in common, and asthose of you who've been in amarriage or relationship for a longknow, its so nice to be able to connect to thingsthat are close to your heart.
and, especially when it comesto things that have to do withyour children and your career is all wrappedup in one. this is kind of likethe holy grail of things that we'vefinally reached to be able to do this together. but i have to say that primarily my interest in doing this is notso much as a i'm a muslim, i want to bringmy faith to you sort of thing, i consider my faith and mypractice something veryprivate. but the fact of the matter is,that i have children
not just my own children whoare out there in the world andparticipating in waldorf education andsociety at large but also, i will at some pointhave muslim children in my class. i haven't had anyyet other than my own daughter but i will have them, and myschool that i love so dearly and havebeen part of for such a longtime, will have other muslim families that come intoit, and will have children who are not muslim whogo out into the world and haveto be the peacemakers, and the oneswho bring life and
healing and togetherness to theworld that we send out into. and so for thatreason, i think the two of us are standing here. its not forour own personal purposes, andi wanted to make that clear from thebeginning, that thats ourintention. whether i was a muslim or not,i think i would feel that itwould be important to bring any tradition thatneeds to have a little bit of a, moreunderstanding for it and as lauren said, i've beenteaching in the waldorf schools for 10 years now. mychildren and my family havebeen a part of it
for, almost 11 years? i have a13 year old boy, and so we started inparent child with him. and, its been a wonderful, amazingexperience, and i have to say, that as parent,when we were, as parents whenwe were deciding on how we wanted toeducate our children, what did we want to bring to them? and ihave to put this little caveat,jihad was studying islamic studies, thatwas his field of academic study all the waythrough the ph.d level, and
worked as the director of anislamic center, the oldest mosque in california. so thiswas our context. yet when wewere looking for a school for our children, our firstsort of instinct was not to goto the islamic schools, which is what we wereencouraged to do, but to go toa place that resonated most with ourown spiritual practice, and itjust happened to be the waldorf school. and i haddone a little bit of study about rudolf steiner, and waldorfeducation and to me it just seemed like a natural place forour children to be, because itdid exactly what we wanted for ourchildren. which was to focus on
their connection to thespiritual world, and to reallysee education through that lense. so our affections for the entire schooling are very dear, andthe fact that there is anopportunity also for us tocontribute something when we get so muchfrom waldorf, for us to givesomething back is really, today i kind of feellike is part of a culmination of that. so, i'm also going tolet jihad introduce himselfbefore i babble on. >i'm so happy to behere to listen to
anjum, and when the opportunityinvitation came for us topresent today, i said excellent i'll bein the front row clapping andcheering you on because this is your fieldof expertise, and usually as an academic i getinvited to speak and givepresentations a lot, and she is always theresupporting and encouraging. so i said, nowwe get to reverse roles, so i'mthe generalist and she's the specialist inthis presentation, so i'll bepushing buttons on the computer toadvance to the next slide and maybe answering a couple of
questions that you might havethat are up my alley but other than that, i am hereto listen and admire my wife inaction so moving then to this topic, aslauren said there's really several reasonsto be looking at islam in thewaldorf curriculum. one is that you aregoing to have muslim childrenin your classes, and muslim families.and there is always this aspectof cultural sensitivity, andknowing who the other is. and this isnot something that comes fromour
modern society, even kind ofback at the roots of waldorfeducation and the roots of anthroposophy,we know that part of whathappens is when we meet another person,they carry part of their karma,our karma with them. and so, in order toreally find that we have to be open to perceive theother person, and in doing that, some times there isthis very deliberate act of getting to know, and it doesn't matter who thechildren are in your classroom, if you want to be able to serve them inbest possible way, and we allknow this
those of us who are teachers,those of us who are parents. wehave to see each individual child. and all ofthe history and all of thebiography and all of the context thatcomes with them in order togive them every thing that they need. for amuslim child to be in a class room, and i cantell you maybe from mychildren's experience and from my experience fromgrowing up, because my parentsimmigrated here when i was just 2 years old. and they had zero experience with americanculture. they literally, mymother in particular
who grew up in a village inkashmir, was educated up grade 8, because that iswhat society allowed her married my father who was aphysician, and who was westwardbound and he came out here, and soshe was literally was taken from the village to a citywhere she lived for a littlewhile, and then from the city to america. she didn't evenspeak a word of english. yetshe was plopped down in this lovely apartmentcomplex 1970's in ann arbor, michigan.and it just so happen that amongst all of the hippiesthat were living in ourapartment complex
someone decided to start acooperative waldorf inspired kindergarten. so years later my children were in parent childand we were singing somethingand my mother said oh, i know that song. i said,you do? and she said, yes! wehad that when you were in, we used to sing thatsong when we were doing ablessing in our apartment complex, we used tomeet in the community room andwe would sing that and so she kind of recalledslowly that there were some elementsthat were very similar to whatwe were doing it turns out that for one year,one year only
i was a student in acooperative waldorf inspiredschool in ann arbor, michigan. andthen of course it comes fullcircle and this is where we decided tosettle our children. so hereshe was not knowing anything, we werein school and my parents were not reallyable to support us through thisprocess of being very different in thissea of otherwise sameness. and how iteffected me as a child, was that i feltthat i had to sort of live up to what everyone elsewas doing. i was the first
to raise my hand. i was marrytwo years in a row in the christmas pageant at myschool, holding babe in arms. and my parentsjust kind of said, well i don'tif ... we don't really do physicalrepresentations of these but you really like to sing, sook! so i was marry second and third grade i wasmarry. so this is kind of howmy life went because its what was availableto me, and its what suited myinterests at the time. there was zerorecognition really of the fact that we weremuslim, other than
being the multicultural peoplein the community, and my parents really had tostruggle to find outlets for our islamic identity outside ofschool and parents of course, we allhave to work and struggle forour children but its so nice to know that you aresending your child to a place where they will be seen for whothey are, and where their needswill be met for what they are. and so, as a child i so wished that myteachers had brought up one thing thatseemed familiar to me, thattied my
home life with my school life.and as waldorf educators itswhat we strive to do. is to createthis beautiful nexus, so that children don't have to switchparadigms, and to be one thingin one place and another thing in anotherplace. how do we create thateven flow so that a child can be, andbecome who they are meant to be. and part of it isgetting to know who they areare, and providing them with what they need. so, i've been thinking a lot about how can we bring this to ourchildren?
and in what stages is itnatural? now, its my firm belief that when we bringthese multicultural notions to students, it shouldbe in a way thats very naturaland organic. i have walked through publicschool class rooms where thereare posters on the wall: "i'mchinese" "i have two mothers" its veryin your face, its not a naturalpart of the environment. but how do webring these same awarenessesand sensitivities to the adults andchildren in these environmentswithout making it "egh, this is what it is,appreciate this, this isdifference"
but instead, weaving it in totheir life making them familiar with it in the early childhood years,its kind of simple. we already know how webring early childhood education we bring it through rhythm, webring it through repetition we bring it through song, webring it through tale and you can bring that in theearly childhood class roomwithout saying "this is a story about muslimsand islam." no, here is a story, we aretalking, say in the
time of thanksgiving, andharvest. perhaps the story comes from a muslim land, or amuslim culture and has muslim characters. so these are sortof subtle ways of bringing it in jihad and i were having adiscussion about, even in ourhousehold how we've incorporated islamicculture into our household. its never in your face, itdoesn't work for children, theydon't work up here they are not intellectuallytaking information in andfiling it in their cultural filo dex,"ah, this is islam and muslim" "ah, this is jews and judasim"its more
"ah, this is somethingfamiliar" it gets put in there. and theres this lovelyteacher at pasadena waldorfschool who talked to the parents in the highschool about these hooks. so itbecomes this little conceptional hook that is there, and it's somewhatlatent in the beginning and itbecomes active when their intellect is ignited later onin their education. so now they've had this experiencewith a story about a child let's say from kashmir who has gone out to the rice harvestand perhaps some of the songsare sung
about when the rice is beingharvested and tied in bundles and thrown off to the side, andhow the women come carrying pots of food andeveryone lays out a beautiful banquet and allthe rice field workers eat allat once and then they tidy it up andthey roll their pant legs andgo back into the rice fields and startworking. a beautiful image ofrhythm and regularity and what happensin the seasons but they names that are used inthe story might be sami, orahmed or whatever it could be. sothere is that little hook
something a little differentthat the child has had a tasteof. i remember, maybe it was 5 or 6 years ago, we had afestival of lights at our school. and aspart of this beautifulcelebration of light, they invited people inour school community members, to invitesomeone from their tradition who could bring a tradition oflight. my family and i invited a good friend ofours who has this beautiful voice, he recites
the quran, and he makes abeautiful call to prayer. andso we thought that it would be a lovelycontribution to this festivalof lights for him to stand up and make this callto prayer, which resounds throughout the muslim world.and he did so there was several othertraditions, the agape choir sang there was a beautiful cantorfrom a local synagogue that sang some beautiful songs.there was lots of things, manyfamiliar sounds. and then ben youcefstood up and he made the athaan it was so different for thechildren that they began to
giggle, because they didn'tunderstand it. they didn't even understandthe sound of it. it was soforeign to them and i remember my son saying"mom, they are laughing at him." and i said "they're notlaughing at him, they arelaughing because they don't understandyet." and i said, "but justwait, they'll stop." and it did. i think it tookabout 45 seconds, maybe a minute, and giggling sort of subsided andeveryone was just sort of gluedto him but how can we get to the pointwhere these
sounds don't make everyonegiggle, because all of a sudden it almost feels like an assaultto your senses if you are notfamiliar to it and you're that young. so,again bringing familiarity, creating theselittle mental hooks that cantranslate into understanding a little bitlater. that's kind of where early childhood, there will bean opportunity to see a little puppet show later on,based on an islamic folk tale a folk tale from the muslimworld. but these are ways tobring them into the early childhood curriculum.and then you
move on. my daughter is goinginto grade 1 next year interestingly enough she isgoing grade 1 with the veryfirst teacher i ever had at the school. itwas our parent child teacher,and now she's moved into the grades. you know, herteacher came to me and she said "ok, so i'm trying to think ofways to bring in what noah needsinto the first grade curriculum. and, i know i cando it next year with saints that's not a problem, i'vealready got that figured out.but i'm trying to think if you have anyideas on top of your head ofhow i could bring it
so that something is familiarfor her in grade 1." and i said"well, what stories do you tellwith the alphabet?" she said, "ok! i need to findsomething" so, again, its really aboutdoing your due diligence as a teacherand an educator. finding who it is in your class room,if you have a muslim student,and saying ok, now how could i bringsomething that comes from me or, how can i know it enough,look at it from enough anglesthat it becomes a part of me to bring it backout in a way thats somewhatorganic for the child. and so she hasdecided that she's at least
going to find one letter of thealphabet and find a fairy tale or a folk tale from islamicculture to bring in to that study of that letter.and, you know i think that's beautiful. ithink its beautiful that its her impulse and her intention tovery purposely see a child in herclass and then see how she canweave her in to the fabric of whatthe whole class's education will be. so again, really youhave to do well, it takes work. it mightbe something thats new to you.and also
its important to not just sortof put it out there and not really know it. you have toreally know it. i would never in my own classroom, when i'm briningfestivals, when i bring advent in my class, ibring it in a way thatresonates with me. there is a child, there is work, i findwhat the archetypes are in the festival of advent, andthat's what i bring. but i bring it in a way that reallyresonates with me, because ifeel that its important to dothat and i have seen my facultymembers, who we've had lots of
chances to talk, do the samething, get to know somethingand then bring it to the students in their class. grade 2, when my son karim wasin grade 2 he has this fabulous teachernamed alexander marchand at ourschool alexander is lovely cholericfellow and he came to me and he said "i'm bringing itinto the curriculum kadin's saint, his verse isgoing to be rumi, i'm justletting you know and i'm bringing a few muslimsaints." and i said "that'swonderful" and he said, "what's youropinion, which ones do youthink are important to bring"
and i kind of opened up, iactually googled because i was unfamiliar atthat point, a list of islamicsaints and it was just so overwhelming. i was like "i'msorry i can't help you, i don'tany of them well enough" except for you know, rumi thatwas the one i knew. and he wrote and i wish i had brought it,but he wrote this beautifulverse birthday verse for kadin, thatjust its the whirling dervish and mychild can always be found up in a tree, i meanhe is always upward bound butit was this beautiful thing, and ireally felt that
my child was seen. and he wasgiven just the right birthday verse, with just theright person and it was because of the due diligence of thisteacher who made the willful work to do this for my child. really what i want to focus on today, is middle school. sothat's kind of what i feel appropriate and organic for theearly childhood and earliergrades the opportunity to bring islamin a more academic form is grade 6.
its where medieval history iscovered and for the last 2 years i've actually been ableto go into the 6th grade classroom and actual last year i completelytaught the block on my own, idid a 3 week block, and then the year before i co-taught it with the6th grade teacher and that wasa wonderful experience but what i realized as i waspreparing for this and speaking to many teacherswho've gone through 6th grade is that medieval history isgenerally covered in a very piece meal fashion.you have european history andthen
there is islamic history, orthe 'rise of islam' as i haveheard many people call it. but there's another way to do it. and sowhen i was charged withteaching this 3 week block i thought, ok, how am igoing to do it so that islamdoes not seem like this little thingthat was happening over on thisside of the world that no effect over here, ohexcept then there was the battle of tourism and therewas the crusades. andinterestingly enough, the teacher who haddone it the year before, shesaid i covered all european medieval historyand then i got to the crusadesand i was
like, oh darn, now i have toexplain who these muslims arethat ... that.. you know... so, she said, and then i had toback track a little bit and it was very uncomfortable.and then students had lots ofquestions one of the beautiful thingsabout the waldorf curriculum of course, is that there isnothing piece meal everything is connected toeverything else and our, the way we deal withhistory really should be thesame particulary if its a history ofthe world that is happening atthe same time of corse there are big thingshappening in china also duringthis time
which a teacher also may chooseto cover, but the history that is happeningin medieval europe and in the islamic world, it actuallycomes together and has profound influence, theyinfluence one anotherprofoundly, so it really is befitting, in the class room in this grade tocover the two together, and so i got every excited. i thoughtok i'm going to design my dream medieval historyblock, which is just what i did basically, we had a
timeline on the board, and ithad both parts of the world goingat the same time so the students could see whatwas happening you know, in the 580, 600, 750, what was happening at bothof these times, that was juston there and we added as we went along. and then iwove i interwove, i talked aboutwhat was happening in both, and it created thesebeautiful opportunities for finding the similarities,finding the differences
studying them. it gave childrenthe opportunity to be able to lookat something and to begin to sort of mullover it a little bit and tha's kind of whatshappening in grade 6 the other thing that we foundwas that, theres a lot ofsimilarities in terms of whats happening. the reasonthat medieval is covered, and some of themaths and sciences are coveredin 6th grade is this is 6th grade is the time wherethere is this sort of settlingin you're studying minerals,you're studying
things, you know the materialthings, you're kind of settling into the earth, and there isthis amazing proliferation of scientificmathematical study that's happening at thistime. both in europe and in the islamic world. and sodevelopmentally it completely fits where the students are,and because what happened in both worldscreated a lot of what we consider todayto be modern sciences it kind of mushroomed in that time period,it works for the students
in a whole way to look at this and then to kind of moveforward into the next stages ingrade 7 with looking at therenaissance. but before as i said, before we can dothat we have to know the subject. there are we had some pretty, i wish that we could say thatthey were great experiences atour school, but i've been goingin every year since i was at thisschool, the 6th grade teachercalls me and then says could you come in and talkabout islam a little bit
and i get into the class roomand the students don't reallyknow very much of anything yet. they, you know,its questionable, like what hasthe teacher covered, because its a widearray of information. the questionis, well what's important tocover? what do i need to get to knowas this main lesson teacher, as agrade teacher, what do i needto know about this, as i would aboutany other subject in order toreally be able to relate it somewhat authentically tothe students. and this is where the study part comes in. ithink it's so important
when presenting thisinformation to the students to have really lookedinto it, and done some primarysource reading done some secondary sourcereading, really done your homework, because students havea lot of questions even as a muslim going in andspeaking to my students in theclass room i realized that i was not onehundred percent prepared,because they will think of the very questions that you havenot looked into and i would have to say, ask meagain tomorrow but, but ms. mir, but you'remuslim
please ask me again tomorrow, idon't know the answer to thatquestion yet, but i'm going tolook into it. and last year a student asked me a question,where it took me like three orfour days of thinking about it before i was able to go backand have an answer and, you know, just reallybeing prepared, because whatthey need from us is not the surfacestuff, that's the easy stuff factoids are easy. but theyneed us to somehow communicatethe spirit of something in a way thattouches them, touches thatdevelopmental need that theyhave. and so what we're
doing when we're preparing anypart of our curriculum is looking for that thing. andif you go in to an islamic studies block, or amedieval history block period not knowing what theconnections are between europeand the islamic world it's going to be very apparent,and i'm guaranteeing you that students are going to ask youthe very questions that you arecompletely unprepared for so, in that spirit, we thoughtjust to sort of get you started for those of you who are goingon to teach 6th grade, we'regoing to give you, jihad is going to give youand i'll interject here andthere, a little
kind of an introduction to islam we have a powerpointpresentation, which verycollege academic i never use powerpointpresentations, i don't evenknow how set one up, and it's notbecause i'm a waldorf teacher,it's just because i'm highly uninterested, and i haveother people in my house whocan do it for me, yeah, so these are the thingsthat are really important to cover. and there is so muchmore, and that is the work of each teacher tofigure out, ok these are thingsthat resonate with me and it's what i'm going tocover, but there are some basicthings about
muslims and the muslim worldthat your students should knowgoing out there into the world. so, yes, i'mgoing to pass this to jihad. that you anjum, itold you she was pretty awesome wasn't she? so i'm going to divide my talkinto three parts, the firstpart is the, what is islam about interms of the theology, the basic beliefs the second part is thepractices, the five pillars,and then the third part is thehistory but before i do that, i justwanted to get a couple of verybasic
terms out of the way, becausethey often times causeconfusion the first is the greeting ofpeace if you want to find somethingthat is familiar to any muslimchild this is the universal no matter what cultural, orlinguistic background the childmight come from this is the common expression of peace that muslims will giveto one another, about onefourth of the world'spopulation is muslim, and they all usethis greeting, we all use thisgreeting of peace, as-salamu alay-kum of course it means peace beupon you, and the response iswa alay-kum as-salaam
my wife said don't cheesy andteach it to the people, but i'm going to have you repeat itafter me anyway. i'm totally embarrassing her now, so let'spractice it once, as-salamualay-kum "as-salamu alay-kum" waalay-kum as-salaam "wa alay-kum as-salaam"beautiful the other introductory slide iwanted to get out of the waywas the three terms, islam, muslim, and the wordallah islam is the name of thereligion, and so i'm not and islam, or an islamic, iam a muslim which is the nameof the
person who adheres to thefaith, and allah is simply the word forgod, used by both christians and jews when speaking arabic,its like in spanish saying dios or in french saying dieu its simply god, with a capital g alright, i wanted to start with the beliefs, butjust to contextualize wheremuhammad fits in to the line of prophets, muslimsbelieve that muhammad is in the monotheistic linethat starts
from abraham, of course thebiblical prophets of adam, noah precede him, butabraham being the forefather of the monotheistic traditions of islam, jedaism,and christianity so, he had two sons, issac wasthe younger son through his wife sara, andhagar, his other wife gave birth to ishmael, andissac's descendants were moses and jesus, whopreceded muhammad by several centuries. muhammadwas born in
571 c.e. and if you recall fromthe story of genesis which iscovered in third grade hagar is, and ishmael are sentout into the wilderness and in the islamic tradition,the narrative is that thewilderness that they are sent to is the dessert wilderness ofarabia, and there they buildthe kaaba which is the sanctuary toworship god, located in whats today, makkah. and inthat the arabs and muslims thatdescended from, ishmael, muhammad some sixcenturies after
jesus, and started preachingmonotheism again because, in the interveningyears between ishmael who was monotheistic, andmuhammad, paganism took root,and so muhammad came back to callpeople to the tradition ofabraham his forefather. so he was bornand rased in 571 c.e. and startedpreaching in the year 610, and died in the year 632. so he preachedand led his community for abrief twenty three year period inarabia. i'll get into his storyin a little
bit as part of the history, buthere are the basic teachingsthat he brought. first and foremost themain teaching of islam is the oneness of god. that godis one monotheism, that god is not just the creator, but isall powerful, all knowing, is loving, and is merciful,etcetera. and is good. that god has angels, that hesent prophets over time, and muslims believe in the biblicalprophets in that they all taught thesame essential message, tobelieve in one god and to begood
in your character, and toprepare yourself for that dayin which in the hereafter, in which wewill be held to account for ourconduct that some of the prophets hadscripture, holy books, somemuslims believe in the torah and in thegospels, and in the qur'an, which is the textrevealed to, muslims believewas revealed to the prophet muhammad. that there is a dayof judgement in the hereafterand that god has foreknowledge of allthings those are the basic beliefs,very simple and straightforward islamic theology is not reallya very complicated thing
practice also is often timessummarized in these five basic pillars, the five pillarsof practice the first one is more ofdeclaration than a practice,but the other ones are the other practices shapeislamic culture tremendously,and so they're ritual practices, but they'realso cultural practices andthey effect the way muslims engage with oneanother on a day to day basis the first one is thedeclaration of faith as i indicated, and that'ssimply to declare your beliefin one god and acknowledge muhammad as one ofthe prophets of god
the second one is the fivedaily prayers muslims are obligated, asmuslims we are obligated topray five times a day, and you often times willsee in media, if there is reference toan islamic context, you'll hear the callto prayer and you'll seemuslims bowing or prostratingin large numbers, and thats because itis such a iconic aspect of islamic culture, thatsymbolicly symbolizes the adherence to thefaith. where in which peoplecome together, men and women in mosques, in largecongregations
during the day, particularly infestivals its even larger acongregations as is the case here, and in themonth of fasting as well, we'll praytogether. the heart of muslim prayer isthe asking god for guidance. sothis is the first chapter of the qur'an,its a short chapter and it reads: in the name ofgod, the most kind, the mostmerciful, all praise is due to god, lord of the worlds, themost kind, the most merciful, master of the day of judgment,it is you alone that weworship, and you alone that weask
for help. guide us along thestraight path, the path of those upon whom you havebestowed your blessings, notthe path of those upon whom is anger northe path of those who have goneastray. now, if any one is christian or jewish in the audience, theycould look at this and saythats sounds like a christianor jewish prayer there's a lot of similaritiesbetween those three faiths forthe reasons that i mentioned, because ofthe lineage and the shared theology. theres a few places in whichmuslims gather to pray, this isone of my favorites
this is the blue mosque inturkey this is where, this is the courtyard in which my father,he was born in the courtyardsurrounding this mosque, the dome of the rock injerusalem, and he grew upplaying in that courtyard surroundingthat mosque. this is the grand mosque incordoba, spain charity is the third pillar ofislam and as muslims we're alreadyobligated to give two and ahalf percent of our not our income, its not atithing, but two and a halfpercent of our savings
and we give it not to thechurch, because there is nochurch in islam even the mosque is notequivalent in that sense,because the church is a hierarchical structure, themosque is just a place whereyou go and pray but there is not hierarchy inislam, theologically speaking and so, you're obligated togive to the poor, to theindigent to the needy, etcetera, for socialwelfare purposes and its not tobe used by the state or clergy. insunni islam which is abouteighty five percent of muslims worldwide, there is no clergy. even in imam, i served as animam for eight years, i was notordained
i was asked to lead the prayersby the community and recognized because of myeducation to do so, but there's no ordination processinvolved and anyone can lead the prayer,men and women this is a mosque, in i believe indonesia, or malaysia, and yousee here women to one side wearing allwhite and the men aremulticolored the forth, the fifth pillar i'm sorry, this was ramadan aswell. the forth pillar is themonth of fasting
and, fasting is a month inwhich muslims gather, its amonth of four intensive things.number one, self restraint muslims avoid eating, drinking anything for 30 days straight except in the evenings, soduring the daylight hours. so its incredible selfrestraint, basically we get upearly, have a very early morning meal, skip lunch,and have dinner sometimes alittle bit later than usual and then, while feeling the hunger pains, its the secondthing, is its a monthcompassion and empathy forthose
who might generally be hungry,so its a month of intensecharity third, its the month ofincredible worship intensive worship i should say,because in that month everything night, for thirtynights the community gathers,usually at the mosque and prays a sixth prayer. sothere's five daily prayers,after the fifth one, a sixth prayerthat lasts about an hour inwhich for an hour muslims stand andlisten to the qur'an recited and prostrate and etcetera. andthe fourth thing that the monthof ramadan is about its about scripture. readingand studying the qur'an
ramadan is really theequivalent of the high holydays, or easter and christmas rolled up into one. imean it really is the highpoint of the islamic calendar. and if there is anopportunity to incorporate the practice of ramadan into or to acknowledge it somehowthrough the course of thecurriculum, that would be something that would beimportant. hold on just onesecond a note to that is that themonth of ramadan just passed, its been less than amonth over and it, because the islamiccalendar is a lunar calendar itactually
changes throughout a personslife time it advances ten days everyyear, ten days ahead so it doesn't always fallduring the school year, whichis a challenge to bring it as a festival, sincethat doesn't happen, butcertainly when it does fall during the school year,there are many ways to bring it into thecurriculum. and then the otherthing that i wanted to mentionabout ramadan is that in addition to kind of self restraint fromfood, you know things that aresort of more physical needs, there is a very strongfocus on
shifting habits. and so its basically thirty days in whichto shift your self out of a badhabit and vices and sort of character things thatpeople are working on, so whatwe encourage our children to dofor example, is its not justabout not eating and drinking its also about restraning fromanger, you know holding back a little bit andoffering more kindness,patience, all of these sorts of conceptual attitudinalthings which plage us sometimes as humanbeings, so theres this very
behavioral and spiritual aspectto it as well as the physical one, soits body, soul, spirit, itcovers kind of, the whole gamut ofthings that month so the those are of the four of thepractices ramadan, i mean thefive daily prayers definitely effects culture because the five daily prayersare spread out throughout theday you have the early morningprayer before sunrise, you havethe mid day prayer you have the afternoon prayer,the evening prayer, and thenight prayer, so it
effects culture, and effectsbusiness, it effects so manydifferent things in muslim cultures, or in the practice ofa muslim even here in theunited states. ramadan, at the same timeeffects muslims, who in addition to allof those things of showing selfrestraint and building character, andreally forming community and feeling charitable, andstudying scripture one consideration is that thechildren might be a little bittired during the day because theyhave low blood sugar during theday maybe they stayed up late atnight, to do extra prayers
so thats something that youmight want to consider in seeing the child in your classroom. just to be clear, the youngchildren don't have to fast so you will not have any earlychildhood children, elementaryschool children or even middle schoolers that are necessarily fasting.but the requirement of fasting sort of kicks in atpuberty. but you will also always have the stubborn childlike mine who say i'm going todo it and you can't tell me notto. because they see theirparents doing it
you know, our eleven year oldhas fasted for two years in arow and they're pretty long days in thesummer, but there is this kind of awareness, and we tellthem all the time, its a long day, you don't have to fast,but they are inspired to do so purely out ofimitation and i think that its good tosort of support that, and just to be aware,should you have any middleschoolers who are engaging in the fast yeah, also if you are travelingor
sick or elderly you don't haveto fast, so there areexceptions to the rule about fasting. or pregnant ornursing, the list goes on, anjum this summer was fasting despite being a traveler. shewent to vancouver to do awaldorf intensive hybrid instruction,or to complete her credential. andthey had twelve hours of instructions aday. and in vancouver because of the curvature of the earth,the days of fasting there were overseventeen hours. so she wasfasting
for seventeen hours, and wastaking, and so would startfasting around three thirty in the morning,wouldn't break fast till ninethirty or so at night i forget, i didn't do the math,but its around sixteen, orseventeen hours and would be in class roomsstraight from eight am to eightpm. "i feel asleep everyday at four forty five in mybiography class. and then there was this lovely, very misguided roosternext door who would crow on the dot at like four fortyfive, and my classmates would pass these funny notesthat said listen to therooster.
listen to the rooster, so ijust had to inform all of my professors and instructorsahead of time, i just hit a lowpoint at that point of the night, youknow it lasts for about fiveminutes, and i'd close my eyesor fall asleep, i almost feel asleepduring eurythmy class also,while standing up. so, yeah, but its there was also this amazing forme because we were doing esoteric science, i felt, itwas all very heightened for me i has really amazing intensedreams all three weeks long so ramadan is
an annual activity, the fivedaily prayers are daily activities,punctuating throughout the, punctuate the day,throughout the day. and a lifetime experience is the fifth pillar, which is the hajj. andthe hajj is a pilgrimage to makkah, tothat sanctuary built by abraham and his son ishmaelsome four thousand years agoapproximately. in that physical journey, itsalso a spiritual journey in which you make god thecenter of your life
and you strip away all of thematerial attachments that you mighthave, and you don two simplewhite pieces of clothing, and youcome together with people fromacross the world, for those of you whoare familiar with u.s. history, and thecivil rights movement, and theroll of black muslims in the civilrights movement, people like malcolm x, who was part of the nation of islam, which is insome ways a black nationalist movement that was oppositionalto whites, when he
became muslim, orthodox muslimif you will, and he made the pilgrimage, he shiftedin his thinking, he said i'm nolonger biased and racist against whitepeople because i formed a brotherhood andsisterhood with people of every race. and so it wastransformative for him in his spirit and in his cultural and world view aswell. so its a profound experience,i've personally had the opportunity to make the hajjtwice. this is a selfie of me
i'm in the thrid row, i'm blinking, so youcan't really tell, i'msquinting its, theres literally between two and three million who makethe pilgrimage annually its really a profoundexperience, and that littleblack building in the middle isactually just a stone building,and they cover it with a black cloth, just to, just as a wayto decorate it, and then theressome verses of the qur'anwritten in the caligraphy around it. but they lift up the
covering, and you see just abrick building underneath it. big bricks. yeah, those little dots are allpeople *anjum off screen talking * this is not during the hajj,this is during ramadan, and thereason why you can tell is because, you see all whiteand you see black here, i don't know if that isextremely clear, but you seethis patch of black here, and you see thewhite, and there'll be otherpatches of black here, and here. the reason whyyou see white and black
is because makkah is located insaudi arabia, and in saudi culture the men wear white, andthe women wear black. and soboth men and women participate in prayer and in visiting the kaaba, and instanding, listening to theextra to the qur'an being recited inthat extra hour long prayer in the eveningin the month of ramadan so, these are mostly people wholive in saudi arabia, with white andthe black, when its hajj time, its much more multicolor,although
the white garb its more intermixed. its lessorganized during hajj. hereit's very clearly white andblack and there's different areas formen and women, but during hajjits, people are from all over the world, andthe men and women are moreinterspersed, and the womenwear multiple colors other thanblack and the men wear multiplecolors other than white once they've completed certainportion of the ritual and theyno longer have to wear the white garb. so thepilgrimage is an important part of islamicpractice, and people areobligated, muslims areobligated to make this journey, thisspiritual journey at least oncein their life time, if they are
able to, physically andfinancially. this is the another stop on the pilgrimagethat's traditionally made, andthis is the mosque in medina, wheremuhammad lived after migrating from mekkah hemoved to medina, and they builta mosque there, where his graveis also. its a mausoleum as well as a mosque. alright, sotheologically speaking to summarize, muslims we view ourselves as being in aparticular predicament as human beings, this is sortof cosmologically how we view
ourselves in the world. we viewourselves as, you know webelieve in god and all the things that italked about, but what webelieve about ourselves is thatwe as human beings have free will.we have free will, we've beenendowed with intelligence, that we haveintuition as well a pure intuition that, the ideaof god or a higher powerresonates with our heart and our mind.that we have also a good, wehave a sense, an intuitive sense ofwhats right and wrong, thatspart of what it is to be a human being. and we also have theinspiration and example of righteous people,prophets and the example ofscripture
so given all of that, what isour purpose in life? in summary our goal in life, ouraspiration in life is to face life's challenges, to face life's trials and tribulationsand to maybe not succeed or overcome all of those, at leastnot initially, but to grow andto learn from those experiences, those hardships,those difficulties, and to growin our character, so that when we passon and we stand before our creatoron the day of judgement, notthat we could earn salvation but that we might be moreworthy of god's grace. so its to
grow in our character, torespond to the challenges, andto become better human beings more caring, morecompassionate, etcetera and i'll be willing to takequestions maybe in the questionand answer session later to say, well where is thedisconnect between thiswonderful beautiful idea and whats going on in the world.those are fair questions, and iwelcome them during that session. i'm goingto run through fourteen hundred years ofhistory, but before i do so i just wanted to say oneother thing that's conceptualwhich is that authority in islam comes fromprimarily the qur'an, which isthe scripture
the revelation that muhammadshared with his followers the sunnah, which is hisexample, his own precedent that's separate as aseparate body of literature teachings of muhammad, then theconsensus of early scholars, all of whichform islamic law or shari'a which really is islamic ethics. and, they are principles ofislamic law, and in the details of which are changeabledepending
on time and place. so oftentimes you hear the word shari'a andyou think of immediately abarbaric or harsh punishment, etcetera, all ofthose things that youassociated with shari'a are notactually shari'a, they arejurisprudential interpretationof shari'a or might not be applicable intoday's day and age. and they are debated amongstmuslims alright, so before islamiccivilisation there are two sortof, two worlds super powers at the time, werethe sassanid empire and the byzantine empire, then in
arabia it was kind of annomadic place of arabian tribes and the, arabia was kind of inthe middle, it was caught inbetween there was in the south, a jewish arab tribe that wasaffiliated with the sassanid empire, andjust on the african side across the red seathere near the horn of africa,ethiopian side, there was achristian tribe that was affiliated withthe byzatine empire but most of arabia was kind ofa no man's land
except for these independentminded bedouin arabs thattraveled around and werefiercely independent and they weren't united. theyall fought amongst each other and they... it was a little bitof a chaotic circumstances,circumstance at the time inwhich muhammad was born. the onething that the arabs were knownfor however was they were uh, they hadcaravans when they would bring spices like frankincense, ofexample which is one of themain trading elements of that time,they would bring it up throughthese trade
routes up to damascus and thebyzantine empire and also to the sassaniateempire, and so where did they stop by, to getwater and to rest and tobusiness? was mekkah and that's where muhammad wasborn and raised, that's wherethe kaaba is, and it was really one of the few settled citiesin all arabia. most of thetribes were nomadic, but there were acouple of tribes that wereprominent in arabia and muhammad was born andraised there, and he was fromnoble lineage another thing that i wanted to add, because ifound this to be something to
bring to the students, is thatarabian society, this structure of this society wasvery tribal there was, no one was united,and as jihad said, it was fiercelytribal, people stuck to their own group, to theirlineage, they had providence over certain aspectsof the local land and the geography, and it's good to bring that and toexpress it because it's kind of similar towhats going on in europe
because they also had, you knowkinda with the invasions the dramatic invasions, alsolots of tribal sort of break up, and veryinsular way of looking at things, and verymuch a survival mode, we needto find a piece of something, and carveit out. and as jihad will probably go on to explain,you know the tribe thatmuhammad was born into, they hadprovidence over a certain partof makkah and that was their identity,and the held onto it fiercely and it really effectedtheir attitudes once he
was actually born and grew andbegan to preach there. so it's good to set up, what wasit like before because this is again somewherewhere you can tie the twolooking at before the rise of feudalismand all of these sorts ofthings in europe you know, there were thetribes. it kind of gives the students a sense of what inmany ways the order, the chaoticorder of things, looked before they switched to a differenttype of an order. and one other thing that tiespeople, ties the
cultures together, is as iindicated, and some of you wereprobably thinking when i said yemenijewish tribes, yes, there'reancient yemeni jewish tribes here in the south in yemen, butalso in medina where theprophet migrated to, there were threeprominent jewish arab tribes.there were arabic speaking jewish tribes. and there werealso christian tribes, primallyfarther to the north that were affliated to thebyzantine empire, but therewere jewish tribes, christian tribes, and therewere pagan arab tribes, andthen there was some monotheistic individuals, butgenerally the tribes were notmonotheistic they had their own deities, that they stored atthe kaaba in makkah
but they also had a mural ofthe madonna on one of the wallsof the kaaba. so when muhammad wasborn and raised in makkah he started preaching at the ageof forty he had a vision to reform society because he saw tremendousinjustice, he saw women beingmistreated he saw that slaves and theorphans and marginalized from the tribalstructure of the hierarchy, allbeing mistreated. and the poor aswell, and so he had a truly revolutionary andsocially conscious message
that everyone is equal, doesn'tmatter your race, or ethnicity,you should free slaves, you shouldtreat women with justice andequity and that there should beeconomic justice as well, and his message,because it challenged the status quo, and the elite ofthe tribe from which he hailed they resisted and they objected and so he met some fierceopposition that ultimately,after thirteen years of preaching in makkah,resulted in him and the fewhundred followers that he had at thattime, being expelled frommekkah
and he was invited by thepeople of medina to live thereand to serve as their leader, becausethey were two waring, feuding tribes, about equal strength,that had been feuding for generations, and so they said,they heard heard in his messagewhen they would visit on thepilgrimage which they did even before thepreaching of muhammad, that wasa tradition that dates back to abraham, sothe people from arabia wouldvisit makkah often for trade and forpilgrimage, they heard hismessage and they saw in him, and in hischaracter, because he was knownin his tribe as this trust worthy person, andof good character, and they sawin him someone who could be a
peacemaker. and they said, welllet us invite him and hisfollowers to come to medina and to bring peace between ourtwo waring and feuding tribes. so he agreed, and he moved there and he establisheda very peaceful society in medina. and uh then he, just before he passedaway arabia on mass had acknowledged him as a, not justpolitical leader, but as aspiritual leader and for the first time in thehistory of arabia, arabiabecame united
in following muhammad andbelonging to the same religious tradition. rightafter that happened, he passed away, and that's whenislamic history happens there was a crisis inleadership, there was severalthings that occurred, but what and i remember in one of myislamic history courses we were going through aboutthirty three different theoriesas to what then led the muslims and the arabs toexpand out of arabia and then within a ninety year period,conquer really the civilizedworld at that time all way from china to spain, whatled to that impulse to
conquer the entire sassanidempire, and a good portion ofthe byzantine empire within this very sort period oftime, and so i'm not going to go over withyou that list of thirty threedifferent theories, but i will quickly go through thehistory, after my wife saysanother comment um, so, one of the things that you might want togo back and sort of mention ishow muhammad began preaching. wouldyou like to talk about it? ok, so alright theni'll bring that. so um, in 610 when
so as a young man muhammad had this, he had this impulsethat there was something else outthere, there was another way to believe or worship, and sohe used to spend quite a bit of time,interspersed in his life as a merchant, meditating. he would go out into nature andmeditate, and you know its reported that even when he wasa young child and he had been adopted by a nursemaidand taken to the dessert andraised in the
dessert, like many youngarabian boys were, that he would be out with,shepherding the sheep, and spent spent a lot of time byhimself. and so as he grew, he maintained thispractice, and he would often time go to this littlenook in the side of a mountainabove makkah, which is known as thecave of hira and he would go there and kindof sequester himself and meditate and in oneoccasion when he was forty years old, during thismeditation, he was
visited by the angel gabriel and in his sort of meditations he heard a voice which told himto read and of course he becamefrightened because there was a voicespeaking to him, and he said i cannot read. becauseits reported that he though he was very skilled atmany other things that otheryoung arabian boys were skilled at, he never learnto read and write. and so whenthe angel said read, he said i cannot read,and the angel said read, cannotread, and that happened several
times, and then at some pointhe felt a strong force kind of holding onto him,and then the first verses of the qur'anwere revealed to him, and i'mgoing to have jihad recite those to you. so i'll recite in the arabicand then in the english, a'uthu billahi min ashshayta nim hirrahma nirrahim iqra' bismi rabbikallathi khalan min 'alaq iqra' wa rabbukal
akram allathi allama bil qalam allamal insana ma lam ya'lam in the name of god, thecompassionate, the mostmerciful read, in the name of your lordwho created he created mankind, excuse me, i'm translating onthe fly he created mankind from a smallclot read and your name is most, uhread and your
read and your lord is mostnoble he taught humankind with the pen, thatwhich they did not know. so there's anemphasis, and its you know there are many other versesthat talk about knowledge andreading and writing and education, and go and studyhistory and study other peoplesand understand nature, and look athow the mountains are and look atthe cycle of rain and plant life and look at howcreatures
evolved and the different parts of their biology, all ofthese are signs of a beautifulcreator so theres this impetus to goand learn and study, throughnature and through history, and so oneof the first, and we're goingto get to that in the sciences that we're goingto talk about shortly but there was this impulse andbecause there is not church tocurb this natural inquiry about looking at the signs of godthrough nature, muslims became the most advanced in theirgolden age, in issues ofscience
and philosophy and the naturalworld and even anthropology andsociology and etcetera, thefirst sociologist was someone named ibn khaldun,and he has a history of the world, but inhis introductory introduction, he talks aboutdifferent sociological frame work, sociological framework, which he is consideredthe first scholar who invented the fieldof sociology so um , anjum is suggesting wetake a break, i think i can runthrough this slide in, you know
fourteen hundred years, say umthree minutes, four minutes? so, i'm going to, the reasonwhy i'm going to do that is because this is probably athree hour presentation, but ijust want to give you a taste of some ofwhat you might want to presentor just generally be aware about in, togive you a hunger, to give you an appetiteto study more. and we broughtsome of our books from our home and displayed them on the backtable that could serve asresources, and anjum also i think has a resource listthat she'll share with youlater on today as well so this is just, its not toinform you, its just to let you
know some of what is out thereand to start to have you begin thinkingabout connections for your own curricula that you develop so uh, there was an earlyspread of islam by the first four caliphs, by the waysome suggest that the wordcaliph-orina comes from this, i'm notjoking, you can ask google, that the first four caliphs or leaders who were companionsof the prophet they were considered goodleaders, righteous leaders
if you will, however during the rule of the four one thatthings sort of went a littlebit sour with an internal political spiltthat resulted, it was apolitical split that resultedin theological, uh, it hadtheological implications that resulted inthe split between the shi'i andthe sunni to make a long story short, the shi'i became arepressed minority, the sunniended up establishing these largeempires, the first of which wasthe umayyad empire, and it lasted from 661to 750 c.e. and it was
under the umayyads that islamspread from spain, which was conquered in the year 711, i'mnot going to make a cheesy jokeabout muslims and 7-11 by the way i will notdo that, and all the way to china in the west, and north africa, which by the waynorth africa, you think of it,that was half of the byzantine empire, i mean, you don't thinkof it now because it was lostso early on but the byzantine empire youthink of troy, you think of allof the, if you go to north african, libya, you see so manyof the greek and roman, or the roman ruins. and then theabbasid empire
and it was under this empirethat lasted for quite a longtime, 750 to 1250 c.e. this was considered the goldenage of islam, where the territories that themuslims conquered, it was underthis caliphate, that science and translation and thehouse of wisdom and philosophy and so many things proliferated. so hereare the features of islam's golden age. advancement ofscience, development ofphilosophy and the humanities tolerance and protection ofminority religions, andmaimonides
who is a very famous jewishrabbi and theologian andphilosopher, he considered the era under muslim rule inspain to be the golden age ofjudaism as well shepha vainstein and i havetraveled on interfaith pilgrimages tothe middle east and we visitedon one occasion maimonides gave in the holyland, but we also on a previous trip visitedjewish communities in turkey istanbul, when the inquisitionhappened and during thecrusades when muslims and jews werekicked out of spain, theottoman empire welcomed the jews some of the jews to live undertheir protection in istanbul
and the moroccans invited therest to live under their rule in north africa, and there waseven a holiday in which muslimsand jews exchanged gifts in morocco and then spain of course wasandalusia as its referred to in islamiccontext was ruled in part by muslims from theyear 711 all the way till 1492 and it had differentprovidences etcetera so 850 - 1492 c.e. uh, and then you see some ofthe architecture, here is
a game of chess between, playedbetween richard the lionheart and salah al-din, or saladin ashe's referred to what's that? they didn'tactually meet, but this is asymbolic kind of drawing. and if you notice salah al-dinis winning, i don't know ifyou'd notice chess but theres a just a side note. this isactually hebrew but this is from a bookpainting that showed some depictions of jewish cultureunder islamic civilisation. and then ofcourse the ottoman empire from1290 - 1922 c.e.
the ottoman empire at one point had more christians under itsrule than it did muslims because it went all the waycovering not only greece and parts of hungary and otherparts of europe and you know, crimea, which wehear about in recent days,there was a crimean war between the russians and the ottoman empireback in the 1800's, but the uh, all the way up to whatis now part of russia and the caucasus and parts ofeurope etcetera were under theottoman
rule. the house of wisdom isone of the institutions that wasestablished during the abbasid dynasty, it was in baghdad in 832 by the caliph mamoun, and it was a repositoryof greek, syriac, and byzantine books of philosophy andmedicine. galen and others weretranslated it was also the center fortranslation, writing and study.muslims were avid students of the classical greek scientists philosophers, and theologians.they read, translated, andbuilt upon the work
of such scholars such asaristotle, plato, and ptolemy and as i indicated the qur'anitself encourages muslims to go and to seekknowledge and to read etcetera and to learn through thenatural world, and so here yousee a person in a mosque teaching,but you see behind all of these books, baghdad had the largestlibrary in the world at thetime and the library was ultimatelydestroyed when the mongolsinvaded and they dumped the books intothe tigris and the euphrates and they turned black with theink of the books
the other largest libraryduring its day was in andalusia and unfortunately that librarywas lost after the inquisition this is a depiction ofaristotle. alright so the main scientific figures which youcould incorporate into waldorfcurriculum when appropriate are people like al-kuawarizmiwhich is were we get the english word algorithm, and hisname became algorithm,al-khawarizmi, algorithm, andhe wrote a is where we get the wordalgebra, comes from them. and there is also ibnal-haytham
and others were big ondeveloping some of these veryfundamental sciences that we take for granted todayor that we don't like studyingdepending on your perspective astronomy, we had al-biruni we have chemistry, al-razi andibn al-hayyan optics, inb sina, and ibnal-haytham medicine is also ibn sina, alot of them are renascencefolks, but this is beforerenascence but they were theologians, theywere scientists, they werephilosophers and poets etcetera navigation, geography,al-idrisi and botany, we haveibn al-baitar
so here are plants, here aredepictions of different plants in a botanical text this is of course the wordchemistry has the islamic context asknown as alchemy, which at one point meant the study ofhow to turn things into gold,never worked but the pursuit of it, it comesfrom the arabic al-kimiya so alchemy and sohere there is a lot of advances in chemistry andmedicine as well, these were surgical tools, i don'tknow that
i would want to be operated onby any of those, but at thekind they were cutting edgetechnology hospitals developed under islam, so they were hospitalsas institutions with quarantinewards and even some music therapy andsome other aspects that were quiteinnovative were developed under the islamic civilization. and interestingly the arabic wordfor hospital is mustashfa,which means a place for seeking cure, sothere was some optimism there i also studied farsi, persianand the
word for hospital isbimã¢restn, a place for sickpeople. so its just a differentoutlook little bit more optimistic inthe arabic civilization arabic numerals of course, wetake for granted and we just call them numbersnow, but they are arabicnumerals, and what makes them unique is thatits a decimal system, that the zero, although not inventedunder the islamic civilization,taken from india was introduced the decimal system and used asan actual numeric value and so the symbols that we use today,1234, were originally createdby the arab mathematicians
during the abbasid dynasty,some say during that house ofwisdom and one theory is that eachsymbol was designed to contain the number of anglesrepresented by that symbol so, here we see alright, and theres other geometry and othersciences, this is the map of the known world at thattime, it inverted and you can see right in themiddle of it is arabia sudi arabia, and then this bighere is africa
just flip it upside down, andclosest to me, this body ofwater is the mediterranean. so and this is down here, this is spain, france, and europe, andthis is the anatolian peninsula, thiswould be istanbul here and this would be india and iran and india and the rest ofasia so, i don't know about all ofthese islands there, but thoseare in the indian ocean so its completely turnedupside, because the conventionof putting north
at the top, thats a modernthing, they used to do it thisway. this is a new fangled idea of puttingnorth at the top, its used tobe south biruni is someone who lived sixhundred years before galileo, and hediscussed the theory of theearth rotating around its own axis, so not justdiscussing whether the eath wasflat or round, not just that it was round, but that itrotated around an axis and heused this astrolabe which wasdeveloped under the islamiccivilization in the presence of a mountainin what is now pakistan and he calculated the earth'scircumference, he actually
calculated it's radius and hewas so close his estimate was 3339.9 km for the radius and he was only 16.8 km lessthan the modern day value of what the radius of the earthactually is which is pretty phenomenal,which is only 16.8 km so youknow, what 10 miles off? of the radius of the earth, andthis was 600 years beforegalileo and that's a stamp that he washonored in russia apparently, when westudy western civilization we
we study the main scientificfigures but we often times skipover some of the predecessors whohale from the islamic civilization, and this isanother chance to bridge someof those gaps here is an astronomer looking at the planets, thetrajectory of planets or theremight be a comet a water clock, irrigationsystems they are different technologiesthat were developed, some ofthe main philosophers were ibn rushd, oraverroes al-kindi
ibn arabi, poetry my rumi he isstill i think one of the most popular poets in the unitedstates, he lived over eighthundred years ago omar khayyam, hafez and firdousi who wrote the shah nameh, its an epicpoem in persian and then i just wanted to highlight some of the, inconclusion some of the artisticexpressions of islam, which was iconoclastic and reliedmostly on tessellations andarabesque art forms, and so these arebeautification of
some scripture, qur'anicscriptures, so this is inside of a dome in one of themosques, architecture which ishowed earlier, this is the taj mahal,which is a mausoleum in india, you might have heardof it. and this is the mosquein timbuktu, so if ever you getlost and end up in timbuktu this is a place to visit. andthis is a pagoda style mosque in china alright, i think we can take abreak now, a 2 hour break no * laughing *
and i think there is going tobe a puppet show offered as well that's at lunch? ok, so we'lltake a ten minute break. ten minute break and we'llreconvene and continue the presentation, thank you ok, welcome back so what i think would be areally good use of time right now is to sort oflook a little bit more specifically at how some ofwhat jihad talked about can actually come into thecurriculum
you know, from my experiencethere are spaces in the sixth grade curriculumobviously where it has a place,it has a home in the curriculum, but it canalso come back in the seventhgrade curriculum and it can also come back alittle bit in the eighth gradecurriculum and theres a really greatvirtue in carrying the thread,i was just talking to some collogues backthere, carrying the thread forthe children and so, as you know part of theway that a waldorf teacherteaches is that we bring something, andwe let it go to sleep for awhile and then we bring it back.there are
aspects of history that arecovered through the grades you know theres the norsehistory theres ancient indiaand ancient egypt and there are always, itsalways a lovely thing when even just in a small way they cancome back and sort of realign were they are at thatparticular time, and theres andopportunity when talking about islamic history,to do the same thing. so, in grade six in themedieval history block obviously thereis the study of islam and the golden age ofislam that can come
but there are also many tie insthat are available in the sciencecurriculum and in the science blocks andin the mathematics blocks, in grade six, one of the ways that is really lovely to bringthis, and i'll give you anexample here, i'm going to put the micdown and show you, but there is ample opportunity in the formdrawings and the geometric drawings to bring this back.one of the things i co-taught when i was doing tomedieval block with my
colleague mary ann who is thisbrilliant mathematician so she had children doinggeometric drawings for that particular block, andthen when we talked aboutislamic history and the golden age of islam, welooked at the art work, the art forms of the islamic world. soif you kind of keep flipping almost tothe end. and we got to thepoint where they were doing thesesuper complicated drawings andthen we actually had them do atessellation which is an islamic art formthat was used in tile work and in theornamentation of mosques
keep going, its in there, itsin there! and the really beautiful thingis that the students who arealready becoming very adept at using a compass andworking on being very specific with theirmeasurements yep, it's in there, you'llnotice it when it comes um, so oh, so you can see, so makesure you turn it about. so asthey were becoming a little moreadept and had some practice oneof the sort of last things that we had them do was this.which
if you, its going to be in theback, but if you look at it it is rows and rows and layersand layers of circles and then thestudents get to bring something ofthemselves because they have to form from all of these sort oflayerings a pattern. a pattern has toemerge from them. so all, the base design that the studentsdid was all the same, but what came out, what theydecided to color and to shade they were all completelydifferent and they werebeautiful. so this is just
one very lovely example, butagain, its a repetition of a pattern and itgave the opportunity for us to talk about what islamic artwas and how it differed from european art at the time, and what we discovered together wasthat islamic art was focused on really three mainthings. one is geometric design two is arabesque, so basicallya stylization of flora and fauna, and
thrid is caligraphy and sobecause of this sort of spirit, or theessence of islam that was communicated which is, therereally was this focus on theunity the oneness, this emphasis on observing natureand finding patterns finding something repeated sort of the signs, that islamicart really focused on those things,and geometric drawings and geometric tilework really began to emerge
and took of this ornamentalform on the buildings, and even inthe pages of books, the arabesque, youknow most widely found you could, and indifferent parts of the muslimworld different aspects of these artswere more practiced so for example in the moremiddle eastern muslim areas the geometric tile work is veryprominent and then you get into thepersian area of the muslim land and then the arabesque is veryprominent, the flora and thefauna
and then all throughout thereis this caligraphy, so this glorification of the text ofthe qur'an, there are manydifferent styles of caligraphy we looked at many styles, andthen we learned one we, i found some bamboo and we tried veryroughly to cut our own pens and we sort of putteredaround with it, and because i'm a little bit familiar i wasable to do that, but what ireally really wanted was to be able to find acalligrapher in our community and he just wasn't available atthe time, but
to learn how to do that, andthen to bring the contrast with the english caligraphy, soyou know one very big contrast is thatarabic is written from right toleft the students loved that, ithelped, they really had to switch modes alittle bit, and learn to do the strokes differently, arabicwriting it really flows, and so theyhad to learn to do full strokes and to not stop, or to find theright places to stop they had to learn how to take aline from being just a small
little mark to being something a little bit more broad andsubstantial and back to a smallmark and so theres a lot of finemotor skills that were involvedin that so each of the students itaught them how to write theirown names, we practiced strokes and we did the same thing withenglish caligraphy and then weilluminated a letter. so, we were able todo the children each did their ownname in arabic and then inenglish and then we illuminated thefirst letter of their name andwe used gold leaf it turned out very beautifully.so they had something from themedieval world
from both cultures and so thatssomething you can do there are on the resource listi actually listed someresources for arabic caligraphy as wellas a place where you can getpens that are already cut andits actually very affordable whichis always great when you're ateacher inks, and you can find, i haven't listed this but ifound, of course we're in many ways blessed and cursed tohave the internet all at once,but there are so many resources, i meanyou could, you find a youtube video on basicarabic caligraphy
and you can find a basic videoon how to cut a pen, and thats how ilearned it, i think i watchedfour youtube videos on how to cut apen, and i had some very grand failures that didn'tresult in very much of anythingand then i learned why the little, why you cut alittle slit in the tip of your pen, idid not know that before it holds the ink for you. andall of the sudden pens in general make more sense tome. so there is so muchlearning that happens and in fact when we were doingit with my students, i actuallyhad
them dip their pen in ink, sowe had two each and write without the little cleftin it, and it didn't do verymuch of anything and the pen was kind ofsqueaking on the paper, andsquirting ink everywhere and then we, on the other onewe cut the cleft in it and wewrote and it was a neat mechanicalprocess for them to figure out,and then you know, i didn't talk to muchabout it, but they sort ofdiscovered on their own why that works, and they'vebeen using caligraphy pens since they werein grade four i think many of them got that forlearning handwriting, and they"oh, thats why thats there"
"we were always wondering whythere was..." so, and then theykind of figured out in many ways i watched themlearn how to fix their penswhen they weren't workingproperly we lost a lot of exacto bladesunfortunately in the process, they got veryinky and mucky, again theres so many things that you can bring,and what i really appreciated about that process was, how todo it yourself from scratch. and we talkedabout how artisan calligraphers from medievaleurope and in medieval islamic society, theydid everything from
often times from make thepaper, to grind the ink, to all on their own, a very organicprocess. none of it was donefor them and of course we couldn't doall of it ourselves, but tohave them imagine that process, wheredoes it come from. and yes, all of the materials arethere, but ultimately thesource of the caligraphy is the onewho is doing the work, you arethe one that puts the pen to the page, andyou know, does all of that so, thats a really lovely sortof bridge for that the other lovely art form thatthis is
from the ottoman era, is papermarbling after weeks of doing paintingand things in their class theyfound this very refreshing, and ihappen to have, we happen tohave a really lovely turkishcommunity in los angeles and unfortunately our masterpaper marbler was not availableduring the time, i think he wastraveling in turkey, but hisapprentice was she was twelve. so a twelve year old girl, veryeloquent and lovely and so upright, cameinto my class room
and demonstrated paper marblingto a group of her peers it was so beautiful, and she really rose to the occasion andthe children were just i think what i loved most aboutit was it kind of held thechildren to a new standard, the studentsfelt like, oh if she can sharethis with us and then they began to sharethings with her as well, butfor them to see how this beautiful art where you take liquid, youdisperse ink onto it, kind of willynilly
almost it seems until you getthe hang of it, and then you create the pattern, butstill you have to let go of the process, because it willbe what it will be. in gradesix thats a lovely lesson to learn,they learn it a lot when theyare painting but your starting to get alittle bit more intricate withyour paintings as well, yourwater color paintings but this paper marbling, it wassuch a joy to watch these sixth graderswho are starting to get intothat point where they want to kind of be very exact abouteverything, i remember theirhandwriting all of a sudden got really smalltoo, midway through our
block and i had to say, i can'tread this, and just kind ofcontrol that hand writing to a t, andthen the paper marbling came, and they just had to sortof throw caution to the wind and do their thing, andthen when they laid their paperdown over the marbled water and they liftedit up, i mean just to see their faces at what they hadunknowingly in a way you know, put down on paper. itwas lovely, and so for weeks we had them hung up likebanners in the window and thenthey decided whether or not theywanted to use them to
bind their books with. but theywere beautiful, you know they again, lovely art to bring fromthat sort of later period. and then we talked a lot about prayer, thisis a very i only brought this because itwas super compact and could fitwithout taking a lot of space, again, a lot of islamic artrevolves around worship, and this is probably one of the mostrudimentary prayer rugs thatever there was but, this textiles and
rug making, it just took off. iread to them a story that waswritten by ray bradbury about a flying carpet, you know themagical flying carpet which this is where thatanalogy comes from and they wrote stories this past year about a magiccarpet so i tied in a creative elementto the writing and it was amazing because whatwe talked about was the prayerrug, as basically a platform for
reaching into spiritual heightsand then they wrote these beautiful stories, i justcouldn't stop reading them i had to read through twentytwo of them this year and just what they would do,and what the rug would looklike and you know, then they eachkind of had a chance to do their own, and the handworkteacher also was very very lovely because she had themeach do a little weaving of thefringe and everything and so they hada rug to accompany their lovelystories so again, kind of mixing themedia a little bit,
a little creative writing,talking about the islamichistory block seeing if you can get thehandwork teacher on board tohelp out too, or just doingsomething in the class room. theres also tile work, you know againworking with geometrical shapes i had the students do somethingthis year where they just, igot this beautiful paper thatsoften times used in college classes when they are doingdesign work, we cut up intosquares and triangles and hexagons and octagons andall sorts of things, they handcut everything, and then had themcreate
a tiled design, that was roughly that size, i gave themthe paper and they had to sortof fit it on and make all theirmeasurements and things likethat, and again it was this very mechanical process, but avery creative process, and it tied inbeautifully, and then there wassome lovely things, every single one lookedvery different and it just charged up a different part oftheir mind, one, i had one student inparticular this year who foundit very difficult to do, and he said"its just very frustrating tome"
he said " i can't cut anythingthe right size, and its very challenging." and so isaid " well, you know youpicked a very hard shape" he picked asix sided "go back and pick somethingmore simple" so then he made, he used triangles,equilateral triangles and hemade this beautiful design, and youknow what he had originallythought was i'm going to pick the most complicatedthing that there is and do it,and what he found is that thereis beauty in simplicity as well,and that there is a lot you cando with very simple shapes. so those
are sort of some of the art tieins, and then there is this whole other thing. i stood up in front of mystudents, and i was telling youthat story earlier about when ourfriend stood up and did thecall to prayer and i had a day where i ask the students, i said would youlike me to recite something foryou, and i don't have the most acuate recitation, nor the most beautiful ortraditional, i have my own sortof thing that i do but i recited for them, andthen
they asked for more, and then isaid, well what about a song would you like to learn a songin arabic, so now i have donethis two years in a row and they said, oh yeah yeah, wewant to learn a song. the firstyear it was with my son's class so i taught them, really theoldest song from muslim culture that icould think of which is calledtala al-badru alayna it was the song that the peoplefrom the city of medina sang as muhammad was coming totheir city as a peace maker with his followers. and i setup this sort of image for them, becausewe had been talking a lot
about the cathedral, and thenplace that the cathedral in medieval europe, and howthey written how the roofs weregetting raised higher and itwas really a place for everyone to comeand the spirits to be liftedand they were trying toencourage this, and then i said, and nowwe're going to kind of go backto the other side of the world where music is not coming in acathedral, but imagine yourself, you're anticipating,you're waiting, hope is coming towards you. this is thefeeling that people had, peopleare probably climbed up in palm trees, their finding thehighest spot that they couldfind in their city, they areclimbing up, they are people ofthe dessert
were normally their feet arefirmly grounded, yet there issomething thats lifting them up. putyourself in that space and one of the students went,can we stand on our desks ms.anjum? i said sure. stand on your desks. so i hadthese students standing ontheir desks and we learned this song. well we presented it at our winterassembly, you would never haveknown in a million years that it wasnot a group of arab childrensinging it was beautiful, and theyembraced it, and what made meeven more, actually it took mybreath away, i sang it to them
with papers, i gave it to them,i sang it through to themtwice, and i noticed that they all put their papersdown. they didn't even needtheir papers, like their memory, their ability from allof this beautiful rhythmic training that they'vehad through out their career aswaldorf children, they justknow they know how to adopt therhythm of something and make ittheir own. and i said, are you sureyou don't need your papers? ohno we don't need them. you know, papers aredown and they're on the thingand they are at the top of their lungs, and i justremember the number of my colleagues that would peektheir head out of their doors,probably in a little bit ofannoyance
because there was the, you knowhere beautiful four part round happening in grade fiveclassroom and then grade sixclassroom are like the earth bound arabs doingtheir singing but it was really beautiful andit gave them a taste ofsomething different, and it also exercised a different partof their faculty, their body. andit was lovely they were even very interestedin being authentic, i saidwell, you could say the letters, ta la 'al well how do you want to say it?they're like, well how do yousay it?
so they wanted to pronounce itauthentically as well, so wehad lessons where they werelearning to pronounce letters from here,and here and i kind of took from my husband who usedto teach arabic, and i waslike, ok theres the lightletters and theres the heavy letters andthey were interested in knowingall of that and what i learned from thisexperience is never to underestimate the students, butreally to see what they ask foralso in these situations and give itto them if its appropriate. i thought i wasjust going to go into there andsing the song for them and they ended up presentingit, and it was really lovely, ithink
jihad got teary eyed in theaudience, i can't remember, butthey stood up there with theirteacher at the time who had her baby that evening actually, andi blame it on the drum poor baby, but we had one ofthe students our declan, he played the drumbeat, he figured it out and they arranged, theyarranged the music all on their own, they decidedon what the arrangement wouldbe. and so we sang two sayings. we sang two songs onthat day, we sang jubilate deo and then we sang this song. andit was just this beautifuljuxtaposition
we really got a contrast ofwhat was happening in both ofthe cultures at the time. so, you know themusic is a lovely thing to bring. thats the early versionof whats happening musically in the islamic world,theres a lot of drumming which you know, its good to sort ofhold off on that, but then when islamic spain comes, there is a whole slue ofinstruments and things like that, that start todevelop. the guitar has itsroot in andalusia. you know the luteand the guitar
lots of stringed instruments,we talked a little bit about they were doing in theirspanish class, flamenco, theywere talking about flamenco, well, again findingits roots in andalusia and in a lot of music theory and so i brought that to themusic teacher as well, sotheres so many tie ins, and opportunitiesto bring this in that particularaspect of the curriculum the other place that you couldbring it is in the study of astronomy, so moving into gradeseven
you have in the sciences, thereis astronomy the arabs were greatastronomers, theres navigation, theres thedevelopment of all sorts ofastronomical tools, theres theories aboutthe earth, the shape of the earth,the placement of the stars, theres all sorts ofthings within this islamic um, sort of the culture and thecivilization that came out about the constellations, the
arrangement, the naming of thestars, the planets, the comets, and there are manymany many many muslimastronomers that a lot of this is attributed to,and so you could very well if you were interested in yourscience blocks, go back andlook at some of these figures. i'vegotten several questions already about where else isthis information available andis there i think, it has always been myintention to sort of put this online, and so i will do that,and then i'll make sure that you all get a link tothat, so that you know
you can have the biographies ofthese people who might fit intoyour curriculum in the mathematics curriculumso you could bring a bio of al-khowarizmi, and talk aboutok where does this word algebracome from what are the origins of it, whywas it even developed and you find out that a lot ofmathematics was developedbecause particularly at that time, justto make things easier than itwas before so how do you make countingeasier, in order to make calculations about things thatare very big. we like to calculate the distance betweenhere and the sun or the moonbut clearly we cannot
do that with the current numbersystem that we have, and so alot of these developments come as aresult of needs within other scientific disciplines, sotheres that and then of course in gradeseven theres the age of explorers, um, actually no i'mgoing to go back, back to gradesix it is a very helpful mode with the students i found, to helpthem to understand one thing by comparing it toanother
so in the islamic historyblock, you can look at or the medieval history block,you can look at prominentfigures both in europe and in the islamic world, severalcomparisons that i think make for goodstudy are a comparison of harun al-rashid who as anabbasid caliph and charlemange. they actually hadvery similar pursuits in their courts. they were both heads of a theocracy, they were both highly intent on gatheringas many scholars
from the world around them inorder to form centers oflearning, there were both highly interested in books, andtranslations and the passage of knowledge and yet they both haddifferent approaches to doing things, they both haddifferent life styles. its alovely way for students to its a lovely barometer forstudents to have a place wherethey can understand one thing by lookingat another, otherwise you knowwhat we're asking them to do is tounderstand it in the midst ofsort of a vacuum oh, heres this individual butthey haven't anything tocompare it to
so theres these two individualsand they're both quiteremarkable figures in history. there is people like salahuddin thegreat, who was also an abbasid caliph, and thereare people like richard the lionhearted,who you know, he was there are many stories thatwere written about the two ofthem though they never met there are many stories written,there are many poems, and what are those called, i'mtrying to remember,
like epic types of poems thatwere written by later romantic era westernpoets about people like harunal-rashid and salahuddin, in medievaleurope there was a song called the song ofrolland, that was you know written also and then of course i wastelling jihad that, when you get, finally get to therenaissance and if you cover inany way shape or form dante, i think half of thepeople in dante's hell were from theislamic empire, so there
are many, and in fact there aremany theories out there with admissions that dante's visionof heaven and hell was inspired by the travel ofmuhammad the mi'raj, which was hisascent into the heavens upon a winged horse, so theresa lot of lovely tie ins. and then nowmoving to grade seven. so theage of explorers, another contrast,marco polo, ibn battuta ibn battuta was a traveler who traveled all the waythrough the muslim world evenin
to china, and he kept a journalof his travels and its interesting to comparetheir two experiences the muslims at that time were known for being greatnavigators, they were also its also purported that one ofthe main navigators on the ships of some of the spanish,ships that sailed to here, tothe north america, were morrish muslims who, you know they wereskilled in this art of navigation andin their knowledge of the starswas
vast and great and were able toguide these ships theres that and then of coursein grade six theres i mean grade seven thereschemistry and more algebra and there are so many tie insbecause of course a lot ofthese sort of sciences, theresthermodynamics, many have some sort of a tie in or a rootto things that were happening in the medieval islamic periodor the golden age of islam,which because these knowledges thatwere sort of sprouting then were then translated, you knowso things were
translated from greek in toarabic, also from the hindu text which weretranslated into arabic and thenshifted into europe, a lot of thesetexts moved through the courts a lot of them also were shiftedduring the crusades there were a lot of texts that were takenover, and then these texts went into europe andcreated an interest there again. a lot ofthese texts were only preserved because of all of the effortsthat took place in the islamic courts, not just by muslimtranslators, the
muslim caliphs employed anyone who was skilled. so theyemployed christians, theyemployed jews, they employedpeople from india to come into their houses oflearning like the house ofwisdom and to translate these textsand to preserve the knowledgeand its you know the theory is, thatbecause this era of the golden age of islampreserved these old greek classical texts that they wereable to move into europe and create whatproliferated the renaissance where there was a re-enliveningof all of this knowledge
and of all of these disciplines one of the other sort of thingsthat in grade seven that comes isperspective drawing and there is also a lovely tiein there, so ibn haytham who didlots of work in mathematics and optics, youknow he developed a theory ofperspective, and so they have found references from oldrenaissance painters and visual artists
that relate back to this theoryof perspective that was came out of this old, study of this muslim fellow who livedduring the islamic golden age,so there are so many sort of facets, andthen there was of course in the ottoman empire and in andalusia, a mixing of all ofthe cultures, so in islamic spain, for how many years? for eighthundred years there was this beautiful
working together of these three groups, muslims, jews,christians scholars coming together andreally creating this body of knowledge and work that spread into renaissanceeurope in the arts, in music, in thesciences in philosophy, in medicine, inmathematics, in humanities there was the, you knowearliest sort of
known treatises written onsocial psychology and psychologist and all ofthese really social arts, and socialsciences were beginning to seed at that time, and what else and then we move into eightgrade. and this is one of those things where ihaven't actually seen it doneyet, but its in my mind, if i were ever to take aclass all the way through and we had had all ofthese experiences
then when i got to grade eightand we're now moving here and talking more about modernhistory and then american history, avery large portion of the slaves that cameinto the americas were muslim slaves,and they brought with them islamic culture, which stayedalive for quite some time. many spokearabic, and came from arabic speakinglands, and there is on the resource list i put afew books, one
book is actually written by anarab muslim slave who lived here in louisiana ithink um, but then there is anotherbook on there that actually hasbeautiful profiles of manyothers but its an opportunity to bringone perspective of, you know from the point ofview of the slaves. these are where are they coming from. itmakes that a little bit more concrete, you know what thebackground it. and it gives them a sense of, youcould tie it, that thread, that thread comesback where, you know islam
spreads into northern africa,these areas become muslim and then atsome point in history this fellow, and this familywho has become muslim through this experiencehas now been placed on a ship and is traveling towardsthe americas, and its thatthread continues on, and what a thingto concede that this human being who is now an oceanaway from all of that, is somehow connected, and thatreally the world is, the world is like that. andhuman beings have
the same trials andtribulations and that one what one human being isexperiencing in a way, is the experience of allhuman beings and they get that. and as ihave said i haven't seen itdone yet and i haven't spoken toanyone who's done it, but ithink it would be a beautiful way to tie whatthey have learned, with what theyare going to learn if you are moving into thateighth grade year. the other, so thats
i'm actually going to stophere, and ask if in terms of just thecurriculum, if anyone had any questions. yeah? [question from the crowd] those are good questions, andi'll answer part of it and thejihad can answer the more, oh yes, ok. so thequestion was one, in terms of representation of figures, he had someexperience with a muslim woman who said that inearly islam,
representation of human beingsand figures was a little bitmore prevalent and its kind ofgone away from that trend, where nowtheres actually muslims tend to shy away fromdoing that and then the second questionwas, that he likes to tell stories in first person in hisclass and would it beappropriate for him to tell astory from the perspective of, as ifhe was muhammad telling hislife story or whatever. um, well for thefirst question yes, its true. so in early, inthe early perhaps not during the lifetime of muhammad but certainlyafter
that, and especially when islamspread into persia what became very prevalent werethese beautiful miniaturedrawings where there wererepresentations not only ofhuman beings, but there werealso representations of angels, andthe horse that muhammad ascended to theheavens on, and representationsof muhammad where he has just avail, so you don't actually seehis face, the body is there, but the face has aturban and a vail covering it,and that really in recent years astheres sort of been a revivalof a more orthodox, i would say, view ofislam, that those things havebeen
discouraged, highlydiscouraged. my own approach to that in teaching mystudents, is while i don't have them do arepresentation of muhammad or, i haven't reallythought further than that, or of any propheticfigures or and figures fromtheology i did have them do persianminiatures, because there are so many beautiful scientifictexts that would astronomers and philosophers kind of attheir task, and so part of what i had them do, was to doan illustration in their mainlesson book
i had them pick three differentsciences, and i gave them aslew of different illustrations thatthey could look at, and to pickthree miniature type drawings that they coulddo into their books. so there is, its a very traditional sortof from the islamic world style of human representation, butnot particularly of a of a figure from the that has any theological orspiritual significance. i'm going to have jihad addressthe other questions, becauseislamically speaking, i think these fall under the categoryof, like legal
legal, um, what do you callthese? etiquettes, its etiquette, itsreally an etiquette question soi'll pass it on to him so, since you raised thequestion of depicting muhammad in a contextin the school i wanted to raise the question,because its an issue of sensitivity, and theres twodifferent issues that are beingconflated in the, from an islamicperspective. one is, the ideaof not drawing muhammad in a cartoon, or in apicture etcetera, the idea is from an islamic theologicalperspective, well
muhammad is just a man, and godis god and we don't try andimagine god because god is beyond our imagination, wedon't image god as a man, or asa women, or as any gender, god isunimaginable, he's more beautiful than we canimagine, so when we say, whenwe praise god we say god is more beautiful andincredible than we can imagine and we leave it at that, andeven in prayer we don't look togod, we kind of look downhumbly knowing that god looks at us, and so we don'tpersonify god either and so muhammad, just being aman, we don't want to elevatehim and deify muhammad, and so the idea ofnot depicting muhammad is sothat he's not
you know, in a place ofworship, oh let's put upmuhammad's picture and thenlet's bow and then we're bowing tomuhammad. the idea was to avoidthat whole having icons and having imagesand engraven images and all ofthose kinds of things which comes from the tencommandments, so its not just an islamic idea, but its amonotheistic idea of not havingengraven images etcetera. so god is god andthen everyone else is justhuman and so muhammad is just ahuman, so we don't want todeify him. so theres that pure theological impetus, butthen conflating that with geopolitics in todaysworld and certain cartoons thatare
offensive and trying to insultand this and that, people are,in the muslim world, sensitive to theidea of, well not only are youdepicting muhammad, which we don't do, but then you'reinsulting him on top of it, andso then theres a lot of high emotions involved, and i'mhoping to in the, after thelunch to open up to any tough questionsthat we, you know everything ison the table, as i indicatedearlier we can talk about whateverquestions you may have in theregard, but from a waldorf curriculumteacher perspective, just to be aware of the sensitivities, andbe creative in terms of how youdo it. i know that this past year ago, ramadan,
they came out with a new serieson the biography of muhammad, and its a dramaticseries, and instead ofdepicting muhammad in the series, because you know, he'sthe prophet and they didn'twant to depict him in a series who's going to play muhammad, iknow its a little bitcontroversial who's going toplay jesus even uh, what was the person in thepassion of the christ whoplayed uh, of course anjum played mary, but thats awhole nother, um so they came out with thebiography of the prophet, andhow were they going to do that right, and so what they did isthey told story of the prophetmuhammad as told through eyes of the second caliph, whenhe was a companion,
the caliph umar ibn al-khattab,and so it was a thirty partseries one every night for the nightsof ramadan, an hour longepisode told from the perspective ofumar and they never showed theprophet but they would always say, ohthe prophet came and he saidthis, or the prophet, you knowso it was very creatively done, and alsothe, one of the community members in losangeles, in the '70s did thefirst attempt at it in a movie called the message,and its one like two and a halfhour movie called the message, and he hasthe camera as the prophet speak other thanqur'anic scripture, or
revelation, and so he was, hisname is moustapha akkad, he wasa member and he had anthony quinn playthe prophet's uncle and so they had companions andother famous people but neverthe prophet. so would it beformally or technicallyoffensive to tell the story from the perspectiveof the prophet? no, if there is issues ofsensitivity just be aware thatpeople are probably conflatingdifferent things, but um there is not alegal issue at stake there, there might becultural or geopoliticalsensitivities, so that's the only thing to be aware of andsensitive to. and i think itsabout time for our
lunch. so the other reallyquick thing i was going tomention is that we when we were talking about the sort of the end of the romanempire, we also talked abouticonoclasts and so theres a lovely tie inthere too, like when you aretalking about why, you know if you arebringing something for a mainlesson book and someone wants to draw that, oreven if you have, if you have amuslim student in your class and they feel alittle bit squeamish aboutdrawing, then that's a way tobring it up. its for the same reason,this not nothing representationalbecause, for that same reason
so i mean, you can sort of tiethose two things together and really, you know part of it is just i think, as jihadwas saying, being sensitive and you know, i know that withmy children for example, we did oh, as a faculty we didshepherds play one year and they were like, anjum youlike to sing, you should begabriel and i was like, but i wouldrather be mary you know, i know that partreally well, so for some reason i felt i would be morecomfortable being mary thanbeing
gabriel, i don't know. and itwas an issue that my faculty members were very sensitive to,interestingly enough anotherone of my colleagues louisa who was pregnant at the timeended up playing mary, and iended up just being like props andthings like that because i wasdoing other things a tree. but again, its just asensitivity issue and seeing, if you happento have a muslim student in your class,kind of gauging where they areand and also i think part ofworking with a culture is adopting some ofthe sensitivities, you know
finding creative ways to dothings that you might do somewhere else. so yeah. jihadwould you it is time for lunch, would youmake a dua, or a little blessing forour lunch. sure, um so the good thing,cause as being an imam and a religious leader in ourcommunity in los angeles, i'm often times invited tointerfaith gatherings andsometimes it'll be my turn tomake the blessing of the food. and ialways say the good thing aboutthe blessing of the food in the islamic tradition is that itsvery short. so
the, and i'll give the longversion, which is also veryshort. in arabic and then intranslation allahomma barik lana fima razaqtana waqinaathaban-nar. our lord bless us through what you haveprovided for us, and give us protection. amen. thank you ♪ so as i indicated before, thisis an opportunity for question and answer, andfeel free to ask any questions that you would like. don't feelshy or
hesitant, if its a toughquestion, belive it with a namelike jihad who goes out and speakspublically, i've heard them all so, this is a very hospitable audience, a very welcomingaudience, but you can stillhave a 'friend' that has aquestion. and we'll welcome that as well but it's also an opportunity toask anjum who has some technical insightand specialist perspective in terms of waldorf inparticular, so feel free to ask questions in either areas,general about
islam or more specific aboutislam in waldorf. yes so, we have, we can go till 2? so that gives us abouttwenty four minutes [off camera talking] very good, so we'll aim tofinish by two pm so um, how would you like toproceed? if you just raise yourhand and then we can, if you want, if its a short questionyou could ask, i can repeat thequestion, and answer or if its a longer question icould give you the mic. so youcan indicate whether you prefermic or no mic i think you had your hand upnext, would you like to go?
i was at a conference, just a few weeks ago about conflictresolution in africa many nigerians who were in thisconference it was a, anyway a lot of talk about boko haram,on and on and on, and myquestion is given the amazing tradition and emphasis onliteracy and the amazing way that you're explaining islam has advanced literacy, andbelieves in, but
they told us that, or iunderstood that boko haram,literally means against the book, and notjust for girls, i think in america they give theimpression that its just girlsor stuff, but in a very broad sense, equatingeducation and literacy with the west, and all thisstuff, can you explain just alittle bit more, how thats possible,where that came from sure thats an excellent and iwas hoping someone would ask it so thank you for doing that,and when i was presenting ikind of hinted that theres adisjuncture between what i'mpresenting and what you see
and witness in the world. and ithink that ultimately the simplist way ican explain the differencesbetween the idea, the theory and thepractice, and what happens between are human beings andhistory and um, the initial impulse after the timeof the prophet muhammad, was one of, it was a unifyingspirit is was a spirit of, that was, iwould say reflected a feminist bent inthe
empowerment of women, theeducation, muhammad appointed awoman as in charge of marketplace, he gave women theright to divorce something that has only, youknow certain western countries is a more modern phenomenon insome religious traditions women received the right ofinheritance, they had to getpermission to get married, they couldn'tbe married against their will,so there were a number ofthings fourteen hundred years a that were revolutionary andwere very forward thinking progressive, the focus onlearning etcetera, but thenislam spread to, when it left arabiawhich was tribal and
to be honest, very chauvinisticand patriarchal, i mean womenwere if you had a first born thatwas a female that pre-islamic era, whichwould bury her alive and thenhoping that the soul wouldreturn in their next born as a male. imean it was a horrendouspractice of female infanticide, but you see in certain cultures today wherethey have abortions if the woman is the first born in someparts of asia etcetera, wherethere is still this preference in male dominanceand in chauvinism etcetera but islam spread to places thatwere tribal, and
also male dominated, andchauvinistic, in places innorth africa, and afghanistan forexample not to really pick onafghanistan, but afghanistanwas a tribal society before islamgot there, and they had similar treatment and attitude beforeislam got there, and religionwhen done right elevates the human condition.but religion as anything thingelse in the world can be a tool of power, andetcetera, and if it is manipulated and utilized canbe used as a tool of oppression and so i would say that,religion
and islam in particular whendone right, beautifies,enhances, elevates the soul, and the society, butso often times political, economic, social,cultural forces dominate and those become theprimary moving force in society, i'll give youone other example in additionto boko haram, you might have heard ofthings as honor kill, suchthings as honor killings that take place, by the way not justin muslim lands, this happensin other cultures around the world aswell, their not usuallyhighlighted and portrayed as part of anarrative representingchristianity, other cultures
that practice it around theworld, however there is a, it happens withinislamic lands, and there was after the fall of saddamhussein and the iraq war there was an incident in whicha woman was kidnapped forransom just by a local criminal gang in baghdad, and baghdad isstill, iraq is still very tribal as we see in the newstoday, and the woman was ransomed the family, the tribe raisedthe money, they paid theransomers, they got
the woman back, and her unclewho was very close to her, shother and killed her in cold blood, point blankrange. and he was beinginterviewed by this npr reporter and wasasked, you know why did you dothat and he was saying, ah, i loved myniece very dearly and i know, i'm an educated person,i'm a lawer i'm college educatedprofessional, and i know thatwhat i did is against my religion as a muslim, i knowits agains islamic teachings islamic law, and i see her inmy nightmares and she is crying out why did you do this,and i wake up in a cold sweat.and he said if i had to do it
all over again, i would. andshe was shocked, she said well why, if you lovedher and its against yourreligion, he said well, hebasically said in not so many words,culture trumps religion. and inhis cultural perspective, if his tribedidn't redeem their honor by punishing thewoman who was off gettingkidnapped, raped, molested whatever, that means that shewas either rouge and didn't follow the customs of theconservative male dominatesociety in which women were protectedand stayed at home, and she was breaking those traditions andoff. or they were a tribe of
loose moral values relative totheir society and they were a dishonorabletribe. and so they call ithonor killing because in orderto regain the honor for the tribe,they punish the woman bykilling her in cold blood to show, well she was rouge anddidn't respect our values as a tribe. so he said if we didn'tdo that, people wouldn't marryinto our tribe they wouldn't do business withour tribe, we couldn't walkthrough the streets with ourhead held high so my point that i am briningup here is that, as people of faith, my wife and iwould love for religion doneright to be the most important factor inpeople's lives, helping themmake decisions
to become better people,etcetera but religion might geta lot of lip service or blame or beutilized to justify this or that terrible action,but there is usually somethingelse going on that motivates human behaviorand culture is one of the biggest factors.political, economic factorsalso play an important role, andi'll just conclude with thisother example. that might bring it home. if youlook to all the places aroundthe world in which bernard lewis, a famousprofessor at princeton, wrote abook called what went wrongwith islam and he calls, he says about theislamic civilization, islam hasbloody
borders. and if you look aroundislam and what used to be theottoman empire the abbasid dynasty, all ofthe, he looked at all of theseplaces in which there is conflict andblood shed etcetera, so one wayto conceptualize it as somethinglike samuel huntington's clashof civilizations and this and that, but if youlook at it from a historicalperspective what you see is there was atransition at one point betweencivilizations that were empires and modernnation states. and the way the europe came into modernnation states, you know thehundred years war in europe andall of these bloody things theoccurred,
europe was broken up into a lotof little tiny mini-states thattended to congeal around five majorfactors. factor of a common language, a commonreligious identity, this ismodern national identity, language,religious identity, commonculture attachment to a particularpiece of land, and a sharedhistory so those things generally wereheld together by the people of a particular landthat made up the nationalidentity, and rhetoric and narrative, and if youdidn't fit within that, then there was, ifthere was a sizeable portion
of the population that haddiffering narratives, modern nationalist narratives,then there was a clash, takefor example outside of the muslim context,northern ireland they all spoke, i mean theywere irish, but protestants and the catholics,its not that protestantism, orthe catholic faith inherently lead to violentterrorism, because there was there was all the terroristbombings etcetera, uh the ira etcetera, its not that eitherreligion lent itself towards that, orjustified that kind ofpolitical
violence that took place there,but there was a competition, if you will, for who held power in the state,political and economic forces at play, and thenconstituency in what are modernday democratic societies in whichpopulation population demographics matter.so if you look at that is one example, you look at thebasques in northern spain,their all catholic but one were, they were basque,and they had the pyreneesmountains and they wanted to have theirown country, and so for manyyears
they would engage in terroristbombings also against spain and you could go throughout thewhole world, and you look whereall of these clashes let's not forget rwanda, right?well a million people were killed in rwanda,and their all black africans,well they were different tribes the hutus and the tutsis. soyou know, it if you look at all the placesin which the conflict,generally they tend to be around nationalist,competing nationalistnarratives, in different groups, in groups and outgroups, or different tribalaffiliations. and even we cantake israeli, palestine, where youhave arabs, both christian andmuslim by the way
on one side, and jews, mostlyeuropean jews, on the other, because therewere there was more of a, uh cooperation before zionism andthe modern jewish state where arab jews were livingthere peacefully with the christian and muslimpopulations, arab populations but there is now two competingnationalists, one is a jewishnational state, and the other one is a arab, sortof an arab national state of palestine, and its you know,one of colleagues at u.c.l.a.
james gelvin, who writesextensively on this matter, hecalled it a nationalist real estatedispute. so both nationalisms are claimingthe same real estate, and so,but the point that i am making is that, whether its muslims inconflict with other muslims like take for example iraq, youhave um you always hear in the news,there are three groups in iraq isis is a fourth, but take isisout of the way, you have threegroups in iraq, you have what are they, sunnis, shias,kurds what are the kurds? they aresunni muslims
well why are they called sunnisand then the kurds, they areall sunnis? so what really we're talkingabout is three different tribalaffiliations, or national narratives. you havethe sunni arabs, the sunni kurds, which have adifferent language, they have adifferent national narrative, their piece of land by the wayextends beyond iraq, andincludes part of syria includes part of iran, includespart of turkey, and so they you know they felt like skykesand picot who drew up the mapskind of like, what about us,right they wanted their own nationalborders from the beginning, soyou have that national narrative, you have the arabsunnis and then you have theshiite arabs
and so the point that i'mmaking, and its a long point,and thank you for letting me use our time together, butthe point that i'm making issimply that you know, religion is invoked,by all sides, but really whats going on is a geopoliticalstruggle that often times is fed by other regionalforces, saudi arabia iran, turkey, etcetera that arecompeting for control over territory,national rhetoric resources of oil and otherthings, and we have otherinfluences united states, russia, andchina, other major worldplayers
that are involved, and innigeria for example, you have a state, nigeria, and i'm just going to go on recordcriticizing nigeria, its one ofthe most corrupt states in the world. they've,according to a recent u.n.report they've the government hasstolen from the oil revenues and the state treasury, overthirty billion in dollars over the last twodecades and um, and have not spent it on educationand infrastructure etcetera,and so you have
areas that in the north thatare historically muslim, andthe country is about fifty fifty split muslimand christian, and in the northwas where the was muslims and there is no infrastructure,there is no education and bokoharam means against education, theirrhetoric is not an educatedone, but they feel like they have some kindof moral voice because they arecriticizing a very corrupt regime, that everyoneknows is corrupt and so they'reagainst this corruption and they're westernbacked and they're christian intheir orientation, and so it feedsinto a narrative that geopolitical, not religious,even though they invokereligion vaguely
but they're invoking it to anuneducated population, and so,its like then in the land of the blind,the one man is king its a very unfortunateculmination of a series ofgeopolitical economic, educational failingsthat results in these kind ofconflicts that we findourselves in today. andreligion is often times painted with abroad brush as being theresponsible part of it, or an importantpart of it, but really it hasmuch more to do with broader forces in history. yes, go ahead?
>you already answered five ofmine, thank you. > i answeredfive of your questions. >itsprobably simpler, um the call to prayer, five times,how does that work all over the world, witheverybody, does everybody pray >at the same time? alright sothe way it works, and actuallythis feeds in to the wonderful points of astronomy that anjum, thatmuslims became really good atastronomy in part because they needed to know when thetimes of prayer were, and theyneeded to know what directionto face in makkah. so now i just pulledout my compass when we prayedin the other room, but
the way it works is quitesimple. where ever you are on the planet, you havea window to pray each of thefive prayers. the window of time,for example, noon prayer is anytime between when the sun is rightover head at its apex and when it's half way betweenthat and sunset and in one of the traditionsits when its two thirds of theway between that and sunset, so there two differentopinons. sunset then is another time of prayer, andyou have between sunset and theend of dusk, which is the glow, the orange glow, whenthat disappears
and then you have night prayer,you have all night. and thenthe dawn prayer is the early, the first light ofdawn until sunrise, and that and then theres the one periodof time in which there is noprayer scheduled which isbetween sun rise and noon time, and thatswhen you go to work. and then you take a break, youdo the prayer, and then you goback to work or have lunch or whatever, andthen pray again, then you knowits it punctuates the day in abeautiful way, which resultsthen, by the way, in people praying continuously at alltimes around the planet. and so theres not one unifiedtime in which all muslims pray
just a lovely thing that i sort of a tie that i made.prayer is so parents are encouraged, justa little background in prayer, to do their prayers aroundtheir children because children learnprimarily through imitation, sowhat you find in a lot of muslims households is thatchildren who have zero idea ofwhat is said in the prayer are doing the prayer, my girlswill put out a rug and cover their head up likemama, and pray a prayer, myboys used to play prayer all the time. it is avery rhythmic
reliable, predictable part of the day. the prayeritself is extremely cyclical and rhythmic itselfand someone had asked me wellwhat does the prayer look like, umfor those of you whoparticipated you know, its a very physical prayer where its not just amental sort of, its physical, itemploys every part of your body so while you are sort of in thespiritual state of contemplation, you arealso reciting something, butyour body
is also moving in a rhythm aswell. and each of those points in the prayer has adifferent significance and i, so theres a part whereyou are standing you know the first part of theprayer you say allahu akbar andits supposed to be a symbolism of throwing the material worldbehind you, and then enteringin to the spiritual space, and thentheres a series of recitations, and then bows when you bend half way down,and then prostrations whereyou're actually on the ground, your hands, your
knees, and your forehead andnose touch the ground, which iswhy there is a prayer rug to create a clean space, andthen sitting up and then another prostration,and as i was explaining this toone of my classes, one of thestudents asked a good question, well whydo you stand up during, why todo you sit up during the prostration, why is thisconstant up and down it was a really good question,and i remember asking jihad about this, likewhy is that and then he told me that there,the reason is that the lower positions in theprayer are the points at
which one shows the mosthumility for all that is, that muslimsconsider this to be the timethat they are closest to their creator, totheir spiritual being and then the reason that theresthis upward movement in prayeris because this is the human being. andthe human being must reclaimtheir humanity by getting back up,that there is this humility and this uprightness that constantly the human being isalways working towardsuprightness, which to me i heard that, and then ofcourse after myanthroposophical studies, i waslike, ah,
totally makes sense to me, butagain theres a reason foreverything and i would neverhave even thought to ask about thathad my student not asked methis question, which wascompletely unprepared to answer at thetime, yeah. if you wouldn't mind, take the mic, if you don't mind. > inprayer we are also crossing our midlinebarrier, when we put our hands, and also umthere was this movement class that we did inteachers training just a fewweeks ago, and the five basic impulses of thehuman being, which
are raising your hands, thenbowing down, and then putting your head on the floor,ground, we were never taught these, what importance theywere because fourteen hundred years ago, ifsomeone would have said, it isimportant for a human being tobe able to cross your midline barrier,people would be just sayingwhat are you talking about, but now with thesewaldorf education, these thingsare making more sense for us, thatwe have started doing thissince the day we were born. but wedon't know what the midlinebarrier is until we come into waldorfeducation, so, this is just
it makes more sense for us, tobe here, to understand this to be able to understand whatwe are learning in our ownreligion as well anjum, you have a question um, so just to go along withthat, so i've watched my thirteen year old as he began to pray, we kind ofmade this little passage of, what do you callthis, a ritual, a rite of passage for him, when he wasseven and he got his prayer rug and he had already been sort ofimitating at that point, and hehad it and it just sort of satthere, and he didn't do
a whole lot with it, but now wesort of, we encourage him tojoin in when we are praying, or othersare praying, and physicallyi've watched him in this process of prayer,and i remember a time, actually just this,i've noticed this with both of my boys, actually withmy eleven year old now, thissummer i was we were, during ramadan i waspraying behind him, and i couldremember a time when he would stand, andhe could barely stand still, he just wasn'tready, it was just this there was a rocking, you couldsee him trying to find hisbalance, he was looking all
over the place, and this summeri watched him, theres just sucha shift in him. very upright, not moving, a little bit morefocused, you could see, i could see the process of theirphysical integration as iwatched them participate in prayer, and itis something lovely which i, i wish i could tell all muslimparents out there, you're doingsomething good for theirmovement um, yeah, its a, its a and it is something interestingfor students to see, so when i demonstrated the prayer in myclass, and the students
were like, wow, you have to dothat five times a day, and i said, yes, its kind of, its one of those things,its, it helps you to become disciplined as yougrow in many other things, thatyou literally stop what you're doing and take thetime to pray, but we're notalways successful at doing that, you know do i takethe time when i'm at work topray, i don't, i don't take the time, but its something towork towards and it, theressomething that really enhances youroverall feeling of well being when you, could do that. >sheclearly was not paying
attention in her prayer, butwas rather focused on our, herson alright, our son, so rafat um, when i first became aware of the waldorfeducation, i was struck betweenthe similarity in the stages of the childhood,or where they identify the humanbeing at seven, fourteen, andtwenty one so i drew back on my educationin islam where the prophet have given ahadith about it. can you kind of discuss this a littlebit more?
so i don't know the exacthadith but i know what you'rereferring to, so at age seven, is when muslims are encouraged to, youknow just nudge their children towardsengaging in some of these rituals, as amatter of as a matter of practice, it wasvery evident just from looking backat the life of muhammad and of kind of the way hetreated his own children and his owngrandchildren that
early childhood, and i thinkthat this is why waldorfeducation appeals to muslims so much, personally i think thatearly childhood was a time fora child just be, and to learn throughplay and even when their parents were engagedin rituals and in spiritualmeditation that the work of the child wasto play, and there are somebeautiful stories from the life of muhammad, one was hewas praying, he was leading a very large group of peoplebehind him in prayer and his grandsonshusayn, and hasan came into the prayer hall, andhe was in the point ofprostration
where his head, everything wason the ground and they climbedon his back and were playing on his back. andeveryone of course was likegah, this is a very long prostration, andwhat they didn't realize isthat his grandchildren were playing onhis back and he did not wish todisturb them in their play so when they were finished, andthey had moved off his back, hesat up and completed the prayer, in muslim culture, in muslimsociety as jihad was saying, one thesort of sources of authority,what we really look at is, ok here are someislamic
laws that come with the qur'an,but then how do we, how arethey implemented, so the traditions of the prophet arehighly looked upon, because youcan see where if you were to tell someone,alright prayer is a necessity they could start imposing it,it could become this veryintellectual thing but the traditions of his ownpractice and how he implemented them are important because wecan see there, ok so littlekids don't have and adults don't need to tellthem to pray, its justsomething that they will learnby watching, and it was somethingthey will implement, and so yeah, thats it, and then thechild doesn't become actuallyresponsible
for their own sort ofspiritual, for the moving until they hitpuberty, and so up until that point, therereally is this working on through theimitation and the child watching andparticipating, in the will and then by engaging a child alittle bit more purposefully and engaging themin group worship and thingslike that theres a focus on the feelingand then the intellect comes inand their ability to make a decision anddo the prayers on their own,comes at
thirteen, fourteen, so youknow, as i was saying i am struck by the similaritiesand there is, i think that there is sortof universal knowledge and insight and impulses that comeabout what is good for thedevelopment, for development of a human being and it comesto many cultures at the sametime and i, its definitely visiblein muslim practice i'll just quote the hadith, inrough translation it says, the firstseven years, play with yourchild the second seven years of hisor her life, advise the child
and then the next seven yearsand beyond, befriend the child so those are kind of, but theygo in sync with the waldorf,you know the seven year cycles that waldorfteachers are educated about. um, we're overtime, but what i would like to do is, everyone who hastheir questions raised, askyour question and we'll do like a lighteninground. alright so what's that? >if the peoplewant to stay around afterwards, then iwant to encourage, that theycan. >so if we could just have the questions, quickly,we'll start over here. > ok soin the torah
when muslims got this directionabout how to gather up theintellects he was about ready to give upuntil he and so i thought that is wasvery interesting that muhammadcame and united his tribes and he did something to governor some way to create peace, soi was curious as to what he did. >alrightthats a whole separate lecture,the question is how did muhammad successfullyunite the tribes thats a great question thatwill have to be offlineanswered, any other questions alright yes >i just want to addsomething about about the education of islam
when i was little girl, andthat was for girls and boys, is thequr'an school, and when we go to the qur'an school if welearn five surahs there is a little celebration,and then ten, and then more,and that also part of the education,thats all that i want to say. fond memories from algeria as ayoung child um, alright. i wanted to thankeveryone for your warmth, excuse me for your warmth in receivingus, and for your interest andyour
journeying from far away, i'vetalked to people who've comefrom maryland and from hundreds of miles away driving,and we're very overwhelmed by the receptionthat we've received and uh, and i wanted to thank youpersonally. > i also want tothank you and i wanted to let youknow, that i will be puttingall of this online and i will keep lauren apprisedof where yeah, and she has your emailaddresses so we can email thatall out to you so you have all of theseresources online, and i'llcontinue to update the list i have this amazing book storenear me
they will give me a call whenthey get something new aboutislam and muslim culture, because i think i'mtheir, you know with all of myfour children i'm one of their biggestcustomers unfortune for us, but yeah, so please be posted, andthen you are all, my email ison that list so you are always welcome tocontact me should you need aresource or a question, or want to findsomeone in your local area that engages in an islamic art, themuslim community has a lot of great networking sowe're easily able to find people yeah. so thank you so much.
and just let me say that on themic here, thanks to kais menoufy and to rafatand lisa for bringing us out, and for rudolf steiner college here for hosting us.and thank you for yourleadership lauren as well. thank you.
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