Tawheed Center Activities in Progress

By Adil James, MMNS

Farmington Hills–December 9–The Tawheed Center is a beehive of activity despite the cold.

This weekend the mosque held a blanket drive. One of the mosque’s trustees, Mr. Asim Khan, explained that the blanket drive will continue through the end of the month.

Construction of the mosque’s extended prayer and gymnasium areas has temporarily halted. Mr. Khan explained that by waiting until winter ends, the mosque can save about $25,000 off the necessary cost of some necessary demolition that must happen for the construction to continue. The plumbing, one wall, a roof, and the innards of the newly constructed area have yet to be built.

As for Tawheed Center activities, Imam Sohel is conducting an extremely active youth training program, with a full-time hifz school whose leading student has memorized 22 juz of Qur`an.

“We don’t tell them how much to learn,” says Imam Sohel. “Hifz is with your own love for it–if you want, you do it.”

The initial stage of the program and all of the Qur`an programs for children at the mosque is to teach the rules of correct tajweed. This may take 6 months or a year, but Imam Sohel does not believe in teaching students to memorize Qur`an and then after several juz for them to realize they are making mistakes in pronunciation.

There is also a Sunday school, and Imam Sohel also makes himself available to teach some more dedicated students 3 times a week after their full-time schooling.

In speaking of the 2nd generation Muslims, he explains that the atmosphere at home is very important. “Parents should sit with their children–if not, it’s a waste of time for us.” They need to have an Islamic atmosphere at home, he says.

“If parents do not pay attention to their children,” he explains, they “slowly slowly deteriorate.”

If the atmosphere at home is wrong, he says, there is no way to make them correct even in a full-time Islamic school. “If the home atmosphere is wrong, the good students will be contaminated [by the bad students]–there will be swearing, they will not respect their elders.”

Explains Imam Sohel, “this year I plan to take them skiing, go-carting, putt putt golf, laser tag, and talk to them about marriage, drugs, and motivate them away from” [bad influences].

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