nurture and the fulfillment of prophesy
I was 6 years old when my baby sister was kidnapped. I was the youngest of the four siblings and was excited to be promoted from ‘youngest’ to ‘older’. For a kid living under the shadow of four older siblings, that was terrific news.
I still recall the fresh package just delivered into this world tucked in my mother’s arms.
But, two days after my mother was discharged from the hospital, she returned home empty-handed.
My heart sank when I was told that my baby sister would not be coming home. My mother and father had decided to give her up for adoption to my aunt who couldn’t bear children. How kind of you, I thought at the time, but that’s not fair! I was excited for her homecoming, and here my aunt steals off with her. I grumbled a lot, but mere protestations would do nothing. I eventually got over it and life went on.
Six years later, the wound was reopened. This time it was my baby brother. Now, I was positively incensed. My aunt appeared back on the scene, but what could I do but glare and seethe. @#$%..
I was hurt, but that hurdle too was eventually overcome. My adopted siblings lived four states down to the south and we would pay them a family visit once or twice a year. By that time, sibling possessiveness had been replaced by wonderment at two people who shared our looks but were miles apart in every other way. The hardware was the same, but the software was different.
Soon after, my aunt and uncle would pack up and leave America behind forever with my two siblings. Twenty-four years on, my adopted brother and sister now have their own families. I have met my sister’s family a handful of times and have yet to meet my brother’s kids.
My moral quandary in this childhood breakup is the inability to reconcile what I know with what I feel. I know they are my biological siblings. But the differences in the way we were raised created immovable barriers like two distinct cultures. As a result, I know them as family, but see them as strangers.
The outcome of the cultivation at school/college/university culminated at nursing homes.
This personal experience confirmed for me the winner in the nature vs nurture debate. What I took from it is that nurture is a powerful force for change, an observation that is confirmed by the hadith. The Prophet (sa) said, “Every newborn is born on the fitra. Then his parents Judaize, Christianize and Zoroastranize him.”[1] The force of nurture distorted and reshaped the nature with a brand new installation.
A prophesy
My personal experience in this debate also highlighted how a prophesy came to be.
Let me explain.
Filicide, matricide and patricide[2] are three prevalent phenomena in our time. It’s in the news and its all the time. Various theories have been formulated about the causes. Experts often implicate generational gaps in age and opinion and mental illness for such extreme antisocial behavior. But the truth is otherwise.
The Prophet (sa) prophesized a time when people will kill their own relatives. The Sahaba were shocked and asked, “Will they have brains?” The Prophet (sa) said, “They will not.”[3] The Sahaba’s shocked reaction indicates that though such anomalies may have happened, they were not a scourge of that era. The generational gap existed then and, I am sure, mental illness is not exclusive to our times only. That rules out these two possible causes, at least from a hadith perspective.
The third possibility is scarier still, involving an institution that looks like prison. Dimly lit corridors and periodic drills, constant monitoring, and establishing hierarchies of intelligence based on grades.
Yes, I mean your school. It is where you are raised or ‘schooled’ from childhood to adolescence by a cadre of hired strangers and your peers with whom you spend more than 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. It is where you mature under the raw guidance of people from the same age group.
Do you remember the infamous Columbine school shooting in 1999? Two teens, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting rampage killing 15 students and injuring many more. They were school buddies who had been planning the massacre for over a year. The parents had no idea what was brewing in their kid’s minds.
Though a crude example, it reveals how nurture effectively removes natural barriers between two strangers while creating huge barricades between parents and child.
Nurture at work looks something like this:
In the U.S., a typical day of high school starts at about 7:30 a.m. and ends around 3:00 p.m., Monday to Friday. Extracurricular activities are typically scheduled in the afternoons and early evenings during the school week; however, some extracurricular activities may also be scheduled on weekends.[4]
Then what about free time after school and weekends?
According to a Gallup poll done in 2005[5]:
Let’s remove the dust from this poll to understand the true scope of this crisis. Firstly, the poll does not differentiate between friends and family. So, even if the teen spends time with friends only, the poll lumps it together as family time. The fact that family and friends are even placed together indicates the societal insignificance of family time.
In addition, family here refers to the organic unit consisting of both a mother and a father. With a single-mother or single-father unit, family time shrinks significantly since the single parent is spread thinner between work, the mundane, and family. The poll also does not mention what happens after suppertime. In addition, the definition of family time is rather ambiguous. Are they sitting watching a movie together, playing basketball, or connecting through meaningful conversations? This is important for family time must be quality time for it to be effective family time.
I don’t know if you have seen the Pass it on ads that advertise ‘family time is the best time’ and the Take Time to be a Daddy Today billboards. One mom commented:
It saddens me that we live in a world where men need to be reminded to be dads. It breaks my heart that we live in a society filled with the kind of people that would father a child and then disappear. That is one extreme, yes, but we do have a lot of single moms where the father is not involved in the child’s life at all. Then there are the situations where the father is around but works so much (or just does not come home often) that he never sees his children and family. Being a parent is the single most important job someone can have, mother or father – both need to realize this and do right by their children.[6]
The crisis is so big, even the government took notice. Now, our tax money funds a whole campaign [https://www.fatherhood.gov] dedicated to encouraging fathers to be more involved in family life.
Now, let’s look at the prophesy: a time will come when the son obeys the wife and shuns his mother, the son will be righteous to the friend and disparaging to the father.[7]
Interestingly, the word for ‘being righteous to a friend’ is birr, the same word used in hadith for obedience and kindness toward the parents.
Let us not forget nursing homes where aged parents are conveniently deposited to live the last of their breathing life with other aged people. The outcome of the cultivation at school/college/university culminated at nursing homes.
So, what exactly was the Prophet (sa) predicting? To me, it is not a stand-alone occurrence, but a phenomenon that incorporates the biggest contributor of our education system.
In other words, a great way to estrange your children from yourself is to send them to school for a solid education. While they will make for great professionals, they may possibly become terrible sons and daughters.
Schools are the new parent.
[1] Bukhari: 1/456
[2] Killing one’s own child, killing one’s own mother, and killing of one’s own father.
[3] Ibn Majah, 2/1309
[4] https://www.ciee.org/in-the-usa/academics/high-school-usa/resources/typical-day-school
[5] https://news.gallup.com/poll/15943/what-teens-doing-after-school.aspx
[6] https://www.fabworkingmomlife.com/take-time-dad-today-billboards-make-sad/
[7] Tirmidhi, 4/494
