How does an Islamic education help create righteousness in children?

We have to educate our children Islamically. We owe to our children that they will be educated Islamically from the very beginning. We try to instill in them a consciousness and love to Allah Subhanahu wa ta’alah. We should also teach them to fear Allah. We should also teach them to understand everything from the perspective of Allah.

For example, when we say, “don’t do this”, don’t tell them because we will spank them. We teach them because Allah doesn’t like this. And we should also teach them that everything comes from Allah. It is natural to feel grateful to Allah. That’s why Allah mentioned in many places about bounties for people who are always grateful to Allah. In every prayer, we show our gratitude by reciting “Alhamdulillaahi robbil ‘aalamiin”. If we don’t have gratitude, we don’t really believe in Allah. The degree of gratitude that we have indicates the degree of our belief in Allah. We should teach them to have gratitude and relate everything to Allah.

We should be very careful when we are praising our children because of their good deeds. It can drive them to learn about Riyaa’. We should keep teaching them that every reward comes from Allah. When we always praise them after they are doing good deed, they will learn to do the deed because of our praising. We should always teach them that every good deed will be rewarded by Allah. Riyaa’ will destroy our deed. This thing should also be taught to our children. That way, when we are not around, they will still do the right things.

We should also teach our children that Islam is the complete submission to Allah, because submission to Allah is not inheritance. We can inherit nationality and wealth, but not this submission. We should teach them about these things. This is a spiritual act that one should do by themselves. We can help our children to make that spiritual choice by giving them the foundation of taqwa.

If you ask most children who was Zulqarnain, most will answer that they don’t know, but if you ask them who was Spiderman, who was Superman, who was Batman? They will answer frantically. We should make the story about Islam as their daily bed stories. We should tell them about the righteous people in the past as well as their biography.

The education of our children begins at home. We should make sure that our home can be their place to grow their consciousness to Allah. It is their rights to put them in the hands of Muslim to educate them. It is haram to assign non-Muslim to educate them in the early year of their age, because education is the transfer of culture. They have a different view of religion, culture. And they will feed that culture to our children. If there is no Islamic school around us, we have two options. We establish Islamic school and put our children there, or we teach our children at home.

Never put your children in non-Muslim school because it is a spiritual suicide. And the environment of living is also very important. If our neighborhood is righteous, they will learn how to be righteous, but if our environment is not righteous, it is better for us to do hijrah, because we can’t let our children go astray because of the environment.