Adam Sayid
Not sure about nowadays, but when I attended ‘Darul-Uloom’ (Islamic boarding school) in the early nineties, one of the first thing I noticed was that the schools had a very flimsy vetting process in place, if at all, and enrolled anyone and everyone. Consequently, a huge percentage of the students ended up in the institutions were wastrels, as parents were using the schools as a way to steer their children away from the crime ridden areas they were living in. Some of the kids were already involved in the crimes, and parents were also using the schools as a way to manage their out of control teenagers.
In-fact, at one point as a senior student I was given a job to manage the school’s office in my spare times, where I answered calls from the general public. When I answered any enrollment calls, which was most of them, I devised my own short vetting questions which wasn’t under the direction of the school. One of the question was, ‘what is the reason you would like your child to attend an Islamic boarding school, and how will it benefit them?’ From the carefully interogative nature of my questions I learnt that nearly every other call from parents were seeking to enrol their child to manage the child’s drug addictions or to remove them from the area where they are involved in petty crimes and/or gang fights.
When I spoke at lengths with the principal of the school, and proposed to him that a stronger and more rigorous vetting process needs to be in place, as my main point was that the school is preparing and cultivating the next generation of scholars and leaders, and thus we need to carefully select each individual, the principal maintained his position against it as he put it; “how can we vet a future of a person, when we have seen great scholars and leaders in this community who have come from reformed criminal backgrounds, and who as a child were academically weak!”
As a result of such way of reasoning and mindset, the supervisor who’s job was to manage the hundreds of misbehaving teenagers, desperately resorted to the cane. Of course, this never solved anything for the vast majority of the children, and I personally witnessed many who enrolled as good kids, but within a year were expelled due to serious misconduct, or they runaway from the school as they no longer cherished education and left in a state of limbo in terms of education.
That was the nineties. Today I have been informed that there is a strong vetting process in place. The most important element in this story is that the parents of the children in the 90s were mostly immigrants and often didn’t speak the English language, and the cultural upbringing was totally different. Therefore, they genuinely struggled with parenting. However, today the parents are homegrown and this has helped a lot in this story.
