The Death of Parenthood, the Death of Love

This article is dedicated to my beloved brother Razi whose counsel and companionship gives me strength that we may yet turn the tide on parenthood.

I believe that the crisis of parenthood lies at the very heart of the Ummah’s suffering. It is a twofold dilemma, a profound disconnection both in the biological and the spiritual sense.

First, there is the absence of true biological parenthood. Children today are not truly raised by their parents; they are born into a world of institutions.

From the moment they are born, they are subjected to medical procedures, poked, bled, prodded, injected, and handled by uniformed strangers who usher them into their new life. At the tender age of three or four, they are torn from the loving embrace of their mothers, their lips barely dry from the final taste of their mother’s milk, and they are thrust into the cold hands of an education system.

They are herded onto school buses and taken to uniform, soulless rooms where their minds are molded by kuffar for eight hours a day—the very same spiritually dead people whose lives revolve around waiting to intoxicate themselves beyond cognition at the end of each and every week of their nihilistic, meaningless, purposeless existence.

Once, a son would walk in the footsteps of his father, learning a cherished, generational craft such as carpentry, acquiring not merely a trade but also a moral compass, shaped by the wisdom of seasoned elders.

Today, young minds spend eight hours a day in the company of their equally inexperienced peers, developing flawed moral notions and orientations. Is it any wonder then that our newspapers are replete with stories of young people committing acts of astounding cruelty, actions so monstrous in their nature that they defy the innocence of youth?

The home, once a sanctuary and a living, breathing citadel, has lost its essence, its soul. Within its walls, women once possessed the skills of nursing, midwifery, tailoring, cooking, counseling, and educating. In childbirth, they were surrounded by their kin, experienced in the arts of nurturing and delivery. A child’s first touch was the warm embrace of a loving relative, not the sterile glove of a complete stranger. But now, under the clinical, detached gaze of the obstetrician, childbirth is viewed not as a natural miracle but as a pathology.

From the home, women tended to both playground wounds and battle wounds. They possessed the skills to stitch flesh and cloth in equal measure.

The home, once the center of life’s great functions—birth, education, healing, and nurturing—, has been stripped of its purpose. These sacred duties have been siphoned off to the impersonal machinery of the state, an entity incapable of genuine care and concern.

Homes are no longer institutions. They are Airbnbs. Bodies may dwell within them as a place for eating and sleeping, but hearts dwell there no longer.

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We have become estranged from our parenthood in every meaningful sense of the word.

Then there is the absence of spiritual parenthood, “the father of the spirit.”

One of my beloved teachers, may Allah—Mighty and Sublime is He—preserve him, once remarked that “the Ummah has become full of spiritual bastards.” This stark statement, coming from a man known for his piety, kindness, and grace, shocked me very deeply. But he explained that, throughout the history of Islam, every man had a shaykh, a spiritual guide. A Muslim man might have a father of flesh and blood, but his spiritual father was his shaykh. This was not the modern notion of a shaykh that one might visit once a week to hear a lecture; no, this was a far deeper connection.

In the pre-modern world, a man lived with his shaykh, studied under him, and shared a contiguous period of life with him. A shaykh would take on only a handful of students, dedicating all his time, attention, and wisdom to these select few. He fed them, clothed them, and counseled them. From this intimate relationship emerged the great scholars of our tradition. Both a man and his wife would often be guided by the same shaykh (of course, while adhering to the dictates of the Shari’ah), under his spiritual tutelage and care.

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Today, the modern madrasah system is but a pale imitation of post-industrial schooling, lacking the intimacy, the tarbiyah (nurturing), the tazkiyah (purification), and the islah (reform) that were once so central to the transmission of knowledge and virtue. The bond between teacher and student has become transactional, devoid of the deep personal connection that gave birth to our greatest scholars.

Consider Imam Al-Tirmidhi and his love for his spiritual father, Imam Bukhari (Allah have mercy on them both). Upon the passing of his beloved shaykh, Imam Al-Tirmidhi wept so intensely that, according to some accounts, he lost his eyesight. This profound love and devotion are the hallmarks of true spiritual parenthood.

Perhaps the gravest of our maladies is this state of spiritual illegitimacy. It is this profound void that most deeply explains the spiritually barren condition of our Ummah today.

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