Abstract
Muslim life on the individual, family, and community levels continues to revolve around fundamental spiritual principles, themes, and values with corresponding meanings that impact purpose of life and even lifestyle. Muslim parents pursue ways and means to nurture their children’s spirituality, strengthen their moral resilience, and shape their identity as effective members of society. This theoretical study explores Islamic insights into spiritual parenting, addressing questions around what defines spiritual parenting and constitutes its core tenets, characteristics and approaches, and principles and guidelines used by Muslims to raise spiritual children. This study identifies a rich Islamic conceptualization and theoretical approach to holistic spiritual parenting that engages with modernity and allows room for adaptation, creativity, and intercultural experience. Further empirical research is needed to shed light on the current dynamics of Muslim spiritual parenting, parents’ struggles, accommodations, adaptations, as well as caregiver resistance in practices of spiritual parenting, which would help us better understand the needs and challenges facing Muslim families today and further enrich our understanding of comparative and cross-cultural parenting in multicultural societies.
Highlights
We discuss some of the basic foundations, premises, and values underlying the notion of Islamic spirituality as a primer on Islamic spiritual parenting
Enriched parenting practices have the potential to guide education to build children’s characters, cultivate their inner and outer selves, drive their motives and persuasions towards higher meaning and purpose, shape their disciplinary routines, and further enhance the quality of their contributions to nature and their social surroundings. This broad overview of Muslim spiritual parenting calls for the development of a spiritually-based parenting program that draws on the Islamic literature of spirituality, fundamental Islamic principles and concepts of belief, morality, and law, to inform notions of self-cultivation and development, interpersonal relations, social interactions, and modes of child spiritual practice
Classical Islamic literature is replete with rich philosophies, theories, and practices of Islamic spiritual parenting accumulated over centuries and from diverse Muslim geographies
Summary
For Muslim communities, spirituality represents a core component of religiosity, with far-reaching implications for religious identity formation and preservation, and for interaction with other religious and spiritual traditions, cultures, and education, in addition to its crucial role in leadership development. Themes of children’s spirituality are as old as the Islamic spiritual tradition itself, and are interspersed throughout early Muslim literature on spirituality, mannerisms (adab), ethics, mysticism, and religious education in general. This falls within the general purview of Islamic learning and education, which embraces core issues such as parental religious responsibility and the rationale for the spiritual upbringing of children, in addition to concepts, approaches, and strategies set for children’s spiritual care. These views and others are less attentive to the divine (God), tending to marginalize belief or dismiss it altogether, and, to varying degrees, focusing instead on tangible human power, consciousness, personal experience, and beauty manifested in the natural environment as a fundamental axis of spirituality
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