There’s a kind of silence that looks like discipline but is really defeat. A silence engineered not by ignorance, but by years of schooling designed to suppress the very instincts that make us human: conscience, empathy, fitra.
When Gaza burned, the world watched in horror. But beneath the rubble, something else crumbled—an illusion we’ve long accepted without question. As Dr. Nayef Nahar observed, it also exposed and accelerated the collapse of the Western model…
It’s not just the political models that Dr. Nayef Nahar spoke about. It’s all models, including the modern Western education model that collapsed in the rubble of Gaza. He wasn’t being provocative. He was pointing out a painful truth: the graduates of elite institutions, the engineers, lawyers, diplomats, and journalists who justify genocide and obscure injustice are not anomalies. They are not accidental outliers, but predictable products of a system that often prioritizes compliance over character, and status over soul.
For Muslim educators, this statement is not a passing observation. it is a flashing warning light. It forces us to confront a reality we’ve avoided:
If the graduates and institutions shaped by Western education are failing horrifically in nearly every sphere such as politics, justice, humanitarianism, media, law, and even medicine, what does that say about the foundation that produced them?
That foundation is not only about lesson plans and school bells. It is about the very methodologies, assumptions, and values embedded in schooling. If the end result is a leadership class that justifies oppression, destroys truth-telling, and erodes moral clarity, then surely the blueprint itself is corrupt.
And if that blueprint shaped the West’s ruling elite, then by adopting it wholesale, often with a thin Islamic veneer, we risk unconsciously guiding our children down that same path.
This crisis of meaning didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s got roots. Very deep ones.
The Western school model with bells, standardized testing, industrial chairs, and compliance rewards is not some natural evolution of learning. It was designed. And its design has a history. Horace Mann brought the Prussian model to the U.S. in the 19th century, a model crafted after Napoleon’s defeat, with one goal: produce obedient citizens who would not question the state. The result? A structure rooted in nationalism, repetition, and rote memorization.
By the 20th century, thinkers like John Dewey shifted education toward pragmatism. Truth was no longer divine revelation; it became what “worked” for society. And when prayer was removed from U.S. public schools in the 1960s (Engel v. Vitale, 1962), supported by organizations like the ACLU and ADL, it wasn’t a moment of impartiality. It was a turning point to the systematic exclusion of transcendence. Reverence was replaced by relativism.
The modern Western schooling model has been deliberately stripped of God-consciousness and moral anchoring. This wasn’t accidental. It was the result of deliberate secularization by groups who didn’t just oppose religious bias but worked tirelessly to excise religion itself from the classroom, down to even universal parables and stories from the Old Testament, insuring as many children as possible grow up not knowing anything about revelation and a sense of duty to God.
What replaced it? A cold utilitarianism. Education without a soul. Schools like fluorescent light flickering in sterile halls, ticking clocks pacing children through lifeless routines, where bells ring not to mark learning, but to herd.
Our children have become fluent in facts, but fumbling in faith. The fitra is not nurtured, but bent toward the priorities of an economic machine.
Post-colonial Muslim lands adopted these models wholesale. Egypt’s educational reforms under Muhammad Ali in the 19th century were explicitly modeled after France. In British India, Thomas Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education declared English education superior and aimed to produce “a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, opinions, morals, and intellect.”
Today, many Islamic schools mimic this very scaffolding: subjects sliced into periods, children timed like factory units and assessed by grades and ranks, subjects diced into lifeless blocks, textbooks scrubbed clean of conviction, unique personalities and souls flattened into GPAs. Sprinkle in some Qur’an recitation and call it Islamic.
Al-Ghazali’s curriculum didn’t look like this. Nor did that of Timbuktu’s Sankore University or the Ottoman medrese system. These were built around the soul’s ascent. Starting with Qur’an, fiqh, seerah and adab, moving through logic and theology, and arriving at cosmic sciences. Students memorized texts with isnads, learned in circles of remembrance, and were trained not just to answer questions, but to refine their character.
This isn’t a critique of intention. Many educators are doing their utmost within the systems they inherited. But we owe it to our children to ask: are those very systems equipped to preserve the soul of a Muslim child—or are they designed for something else entirely? If we must work within the system, what changes can we make within the school and system we inherit can set the foundation for a better future?
To hear some educators speak today, you would think modern education has reached the peak of human achievement. But history tells a different story, especially before the secular reforms that began in the early 20th century.
Let’s begin with a curious irony.
The West’s most successful literacy program—The McGuffey Readers—sold over 122 million copies and shaped American education for a century1. But unlike modern readers, McGuffey’s series openly aimed to instill moral values, religious belief, and patriotic virtue.2 The words “God,” “soul,” “duty,” and “truth” weren’t hidden from the sight of children—they were the scaffolding. By contrast, today’s basal readers are scrubbed of transcendent values, replacing them with moral relativism or thin “values” like tolerance divorced from any absolute truth.
University requirements also tell the story. In 19th-century America, a student often needed competence in Latin, Greek, and sometimes Hebrew just to gain admission. That’s because engagement with Scripture, classical philosophy, and moral reasoning was considered essential for an educated mind. Theology was not an elective. It was central to the curriculum.
Centuries before McGuffey, Muslim civilization developed its own educational ecosystems—systems far older, broader, and deeper than anything we’ve seen in the modern world.
From Fez to Fergana, from Timbuktu to Istanbul, Muslims built soul-centered schools where literacy, logic, literature, and law intertwined with Qur’an, adab, and awe.
In the Ottoman world, the Sahn-ı Seman Madrasah3 curriculum included:
And this wasn’t rote memorization. It was a deep system of disciplined curiosity, grounded in the belief that knowledge was a trust from Allah.
In Islamic education, students didn’t collect grades—they earned ijāzahs: personal, face-to-face authorizations from a teacher to transmit knowledge. These weren’t printed certificates handed to the masses. They were tailored recognitions—you have understood this book, you have shown moral readiness, you are ready to pass it on.
Contrast that with the modern GPA system: impersonal, standardized, and soul-less. A teacher doesn’t pass on trust—they enter numbers into a software. The learner becomes data, not a disciple.
The ijāzah system created not just scholars, but a chain of hearts—people who embodied what they knew.
Today’s schools often critique “rote memorization.” But Qur’anic memorization is not rote—it is rhythmic, spiritual, embodied.
Reciting Qur’an trains internal musicality, builds cognitive precision, cultivates patience, and refines moral character. It’s not just about retention—it’s about resonance. Children feel the cadence of divine speech echo in their hearts.
This is worlds apart from today’s factory-model cramming for tests, followed by immediate forgetting. In the Islamic model, memory was sacred because what you memorized shaped who you became.
Traditional Islamic schools weren’t governed by 45-minute bells. Learning was shaped by attention span, student readiness, and the rhythm of the salah clock—fajr to maghrib, not 8:00 to 2:30.
Lessons were fluid. Classes could pause for prayer, stretch if interest remained, or pivot when energy dipped. This prayer-anchored flexibility respected the child’s body and soul.
Contrast this with “seat time” requirements, bell schedules, and standardized start-stop blocks designed to train compliance—not curiosity.
Even in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire—long past its intellectual peak—the education system was still ahead of its time.4
By 1900, the empire supported:
All this in a system where religious knowledge, moral cultivation, and social service remained integral.
Compare that to the industrialized systems of Europe at the time, which were just beginning to implement state schooling en masse, often with colonial objectives in mind.
We don’t romanticize the past to escape the present.
We revisit it to recover what was lost—fitra, moral clarity, awe, and the fusion of faith with literacy. We don’t need to reinvent education. We need to resurrect it.
And we know not every school is positioned to start from scratch. But transformation doesn’t require a total reset—it begins by asking different questions, choosing richer stories, and re-centering what truly matters.
And yes—adapt it. We live in a different time. But that doesn’t mean we must live by a different truth.
We are educators. We are architects of souls. And our curriculum should be nothing less than that which revives the ummah—one line, one heart, one child at a time.
When China opened up to Western capitalism in the late 20th century, it filtered what it borrowed. They adopted STEM, but rejected liberal arts frameworks that centered the individual above the collective. In 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Education banned foreign textbooks in elementary schools and mandated “Xi Jinping Thought” and traditional Confucian principles in national curricula. They edited. We copy-pasted.
Japan, too, maintained its cultural integrity while excelling academically. Their moral education classes (doutoku) explicitly teach values like perseverance, harmony, and gratitude. They models are grounded in Shinto and Buddhist ethics, even in public schools.
They did not just add a “Chinese or Japanese Culture” class alongside geometry and gym. They carved their traditioanl paradigm into into its entire system.
What have we done? We’ve replaced the prophetic way with PowerPoint slides. We’ve turned the Qur’an into a Friday formality, not a living force, caged inside worksheets and checklists, stripped it of the fire that once stirred empires.
Where China preserved its dynastic memory, we imported frameworks that called ours folklore. They filtered the West—we swallowed it whole without question.
To be fair, many of us didn’t know there was an alternative. We were trained in these very schools. We assumed that to succeed, we must replicate what works. But after decades of imitation, we have to ask—has it truly worked for the Muslim soul?
Muslim educators must be equally intentional—filtering, integrating, and re-centering our own civilizational priorities—refining what we borrow, re-rooting what we teach, and reclaiming what we forgot.
If we want a truly Islamic education, we must challenge everything:
Historically, a Muslim child’s teen years were marked by mastery of Qur’an, fiqh, hadith, adab, tafsir, logic, rhetoric, and often one or more languages, sciences or trades. Compare that to most modern Islamic schools, where Islamic Studies is a isolated period, often with little rigor. This is not a return to the past—it is a return to balance.
But what are we really protecting?
The Prophet ﷺ said, “Every child is born upon the fitra.” That primordial nature inclines toward truth, tawheed, beauty, and balance. Every newborn heart carries a map to the Divine—before the world teaches it to forget.
Modern schooling dims that light through fragmented subjects, overstimulation, peer pressure, and secular assumptions that push Allah to the margins, if not out entirely, teaching children that truth is negotiable, morality is subjective, and success is measured only by grades and careers. It claims to ‘liberate’ minds—while shackling the soul.
Early childhood is the most sensitive period for imprinting identity, values, and worldview. It is when the soul is still wet clay—what’s pressed in then, stays for life. If we lose the fitra then, we are not “educating”—we are chiseling away at the soul of a child, replacing wonder with weariness, purpose with performance.
We produce children who can name every planet but feel nothing in the masjid. Teens who ace exams but can’t hold a gaze when Surah Rahman is recited. This is not a failure of intelligence. It’s a starvation of the soul.
Islamic pedagogy must therefore protect and strengthen the fitra through:
That’s why we created Swords & Butterflies—not to shame what exists, but to offer a living alternative. For schools seeking gentle shifts or deep redesign, we offer materials that can meet you where you are and help guide you toward where you want to be.
At Swords & Butterflies, we build every lesson—whether in phonics, poetry, or prose—around the dual goal of language mastery and fitra preservation.
This isn’t about sprinkling Islamic phrases over secular content. It’s a new blueprint—built from the ground up to shape minds that think clearly, hearts that stay clean, and instincts trained to recognize what’s right.
We don’t just aim for fluency. We aim for fitra-fed fluency. Because what good is a child who can read but not recognize the truth? So we’re teaching children to speak in English in the language of light.
As Sayyidna ʿAlī رضي الله عنه said: “Teach your children other than what you were taught, for they were created for a time other than yours.”
We take that to heart—but we also know that time has a Lord. So we teach the timeless.
Gaza didn’t just expose political hypocrisy. It laid bare a failure far deeper—a failure of moral formation. Of education. Of the soul.
Children were buried beneath rubble while graduates of the world’s finest institutions stood behind podiums, press releases, and policy briefs—defending it all. The ICJ and ICC moved at a snails pace. The music industry which famously challenged the Vietnam war mainly stood quiet. Hollywood that greatly protested Tibet for decades refused to make a bold statement.
That silence, that complicity, didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was taught. Engineered. Reinforced through years of schooling that severed intellect from ihsan, critical thinking from conscience, fluency from faith.
Gaza showed us where that road leads.
And if we continue importing the same frameworks, testing systems, scheduling models, and secular paradigms—no matter how much Islamic gloss we apply—we risk raising children fluent in formulas but paralyzed before injustice. Literate, but unmoored. Trained, but not transformed.
We cannot raise souls on the same models that trained theirs to look away. Be fearless. Question everything. Be unsparing. Smash all idols. Rebuild with fitra at the center and build outward.
That’s why we’ve drawn a line. At Swords & Butterflies, we’re not polishing the machine. We’re building an ark. An ark for the fitra. An ark for the stories they won’t teach. An ark for the ayat our children deserve to deeply understand with love—not as “content,” but as light.
This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about renewal. It’s about shaking off amnesia and remembering how we once taught the world to learn.
We know the world they will inherit is on fire. And no standardized test will save them. Only rootedness will. Only revelation. Only tarbiyah that shapes the soul before the résumé.
If you’re an educator or administrator navigating parental expectations, accreditation constraints, or tight budgets—we understand. You don’t need to shift everything overnight. But you can start somewhere. With the stories you tell, the readers you choose for grade KG and grade 1, the poetry and songs you teach, and the moral clarity you model.
So we plant. We build. We write. Because after Gaza, silence is not an option.
And if we don’t reclaim the education of our children—someone else will.
