Sexual education is no longer taboo in many Islamic schools in many cities in the United States and Canada, but don’t call it by that name. Call it family education, says Winnipeg-based social worker and educator Shahina Siddiqui, whose curriculum is being used in about 10 Islamic schools in North America.
There are about 100 Islamic schools across the United States and Canada, some of them working as weekend schools dealing with Muslim history, religion and as Siddiqui calls it, family education.
Sending the children to Islamic schools alone won’t help them have Islamic sexual values, she feels.
“Some of us think if we’ve brought them into the Islamic school atmosphere that we will somehow protect them and isolate them from mainstream society,” she says. “This society is immersed in sexuality. Look around, our children live in a very permissive age, and many of the TV shows they see at home give them wrong values.”
The Muslim teachers trained by her teach the children about hygiene, especially the hygienic rituals accompanying the prayers, and life lessons about sexuality, she says.
“They tell them it is natural to have sexual feelings as they grow up but they ought to be sublimated,” she continued. “For we tell them, especially in context of sexual diseases, that Allah has forbidden sex outside a marriage precisely because of the problems such behavior begets.”
Most Muslim parents who send their children to public schools do not allow them to attend the sex education classes, because “these school look at sex from a biological perspective. It is divorced from morality,” comments Siddiqui.
“What we teach is firmly rooted in Islam,” said Siddiqui, who started thinking of sex (family) education for Muslim teenagers while bringing up her own son about 10 years ago. Now her son is 21.
“If we look at the basics we teach,” she added, “it is not very different from what religious-minded Christians teach their children.”
She also notes that children who attend Islamic schools tend to know less about sex than their public school counterparts, and that is why it is important all Islamic schools follow a uniform curriculum to educate children and prepare them for life.
It is also very important that the teachers have good insights and conduct themselves well. “When you are teaching morality, you have to teach the adab (etiquette) yourself, so you will not be graphic, even within the same sex class group,” she said.
“We live in a society that has hardly any respect for modesty,” she said, adding that Islamic schools could become the catalysts, with their Christian counterparts, in enhancing the importance of that virtue.
