The Big Questions II

I am reading a short story about the Titanic with my third grade boys. There is a moral being conveyed, but unlike the carefree days gone by of former years we don't get to say  "and the moral of the story is..." in unison and a sing-song voice. Third grade is serious stuff. The messages are subtle.

As with our last book, Pompeii: Buried Alive, the story teaches us that catastrophe strikes when people turn their back on God, or forget about Him.

My six-year old nephew is determined to read all the books that I'm reading with the older boys because even if they are too scary to play with in the dirt patch, at least he'll know that he's just as smart as they are. After he read Titanic, I explained to my nephew that the people who had built the Titanic claimed that "Even God Himself cannot sink this ship." Here, I opened my eyes as wide as possible to convey the gravity of such a declaration.

He thought about it for a minute, as he usually does before deciding to believe something I tell him.

Then he asked, "Were the people on the Titanic Muslim?"

I answered truthfully that I did not know, but probably not.

"So then if they said that even God can't sink the ship, they weren't talking about Allah, right? Because they don't think Allah is God."

I agreed.

"So then they weren't actually saying anything wrong because whoever they think God is probably couldn't sink the ship. Like if their God was a rock, or just a regular person." Then he laughed to himself. "Because that would be really silly, right?"

Aside from my obvious conclusion that this kid is awesome, what is amazing to me is that he always insists on finding a way to defend the people of the past with unshakeable confidence that no matter what happened, there was always a chance that maybe, just maybe, some of them became Muslim before they died. Particularly in stories where it is not clearly stated whether or not the characters rejected the message of Islam (most stories). He even goes so far as to say probably. "If they weren't bad people, then they probably became Muslim before they died," he often concludes.

As the resident Khala, this puts me in situations where I have to wonder, should I just agree with him, to encourage him to have confidence in his own intellect, or should I say what I think the average American non-Muslim's reaction to this would be. Something like you shouldn't think that someone has to be Muslim just because they are good- there are good "Christmas-people" too. Or should I prepare him for the harsh realization that there are many non-Muslims that are also good people, and they won't ever become Muslim. That doesn’t mean they won’t go to heaven, but it does mean that they will be held accountable for rejecting it because they were blessed enough to have the gift of a Muslim in their lives who taught them about Islam- and hey guess what- that person is you!

It's one of those points of aqida that troubled me as a kid but was eventually sanded over by faith in the justice of Allah. Still, it took a while.

I would about all those kids I was friends with who knew nothing about Islam except that "Shefa is one." My sense of personal guilt was fully formed into its own creature by the ripe age of six (she has pigtails) and she wondered- will they remember me on the Day of Judgment? When they finally learn that Islam was the truth and then they're thinking what?! but the only thing I know about Islam is that weird stuff that fat girl used to tell me at recess. And now it's too late...

And then I would feel really awful about any recent friendships I had forged.

Then I would picture some sort of moat with people drowning in it.

This imagery may have been a result of too many hours spent playing King's Quest, or is from something some adult told me once and I believed them without the same sense of caution that keeps my own nephew's aqida bubble wrapped and safe from the little jabs of adults who irresponsibly try to explain important stuff to formative minds without any prep work.

But this little guy is a thinker, and he’s catching on that I don’t always know how to answer his questions, as I more and more frequently resort to an old standard for self-respecting Khala's across the world –

Go ask your baba.

Because I refuse to be responsible for any kid to be terrified of the afterlife because he is plagued by a vision of some sort of sci-fi moat where all his friends are drowning. And it's getting trickier, now that the kids are getting older. Old enough to remember what I'm saying and to wonder about it later.