SPEECH DELIVERED BY ABDULKAREEM TOYYIB AT
AIMSOSA 4th ANNIVERSARY
AM I PRIVILEDGED?
Let me start by saying that it is such an honour to stand in
front of my teachers and elders seated, I pray that
Allah lengthen their lives on the Deen and forgive me of
my shortcomings.
What if I told each of you to tell me the first thing that
comes to mind when I say the word AL-Birr? For some of
you, it might be good teachers, the standard of study,
amazing principal and headmaster and for some of you it
might also be images associated with just Islamic
knowledge not enough infrastructure, not enough
teacher, being called ILE KEWU and why
is this?
Because in the popular imagination and in our environment
we are constantly shown as a place of just ILE KEWU. So
we see how AL-BIRR students cannot do but we don't see
what AL-Birr students can do. We see that we go to
Al-Birr just to pass through but we fail to see how Al-Birr
is impacting on us.
So Al-birr becomes a place where all the thoughts is
about building its
well (as in water ),building its structures, enhancing its
library. A place where you can go do your charity. We
come
to Al-birr because of its cheap fees and because it
is A MUSLIM school but we failed to see that those people
are building our future.
I was raised in this vicinity and I have noticed that among
us complaining about our problems is an art form. So
conversations with friends, parent, well-wishers, very
quickly become a passion rant about Al-Birr problems,
about the state of facilities, about the buildings, about the
laboratories and those sort of thing. But when a foreigner
particularly a non al-birr member says the exact thing Al-
Birr People become furious. Now I have always been
curious about this particular brand of Al-Birr
defensiveness which I happen to have in sizeable amount
by the way. So I have often wondered why we have this
defensiveness. After all, What the foreigners say about us
is true. We do a lot Islamic studying and our infrastructure
are not the best so the terms like ILE KEWU and it seems
to me we are defensive because we know that Al-Birr
members that complain about our problems know the
stories of Al-Birr from lived experiences. They know we
have a lot of resourcefulness, ingenuity, they know about
what the students dream about, what they aspire to, what
motivate them, what they value and we sense that these
foreigners do not know those other stories and so they
are more likely to see us only as about our problems and
so our defensiveness emerges. We are defensive because
we are eager to preserve that elusive and most important
of human qualities, DIGNITY . We are defensive because
we
do not want to be reduced to ilmu deen alone.
Sometimes ago, I was having a conversation with a friend
who told me that I was one of those privileged student
because of what he called my privileged upbringing and
my
privileged grooming. I was taken aback, I had never being
called privilege in my life, I never thought of myself as
privileged. I thought to myself how can I be possibly
privileged after all I schooled in an unpleasant building. I
told myself going to Al-Birr was not a privilege because
the school is not wealthy. YES, there was a time we used
a nice flat painted, plastered and structured with a large
yard behind for playing but there were also those times
when we move from that structure to a structure made of
wood.
And then it struck me that part of being privileged is
denying privilege. Of course, I was privileged. It was easy
in comparing myself to people who had gone to model
schools , international schools to say that I was not
privilege but what if I compared myself to people who
lacked the little structure my school had. Students who
may take a subject per day or students who do not have
any science teacher in their vicinity. What of people who
went to a school that Christianity is the order of the day?
Al-Birr is far from wealthy but has so high a standard that
she has made us who we are, and so that with even the
odds we had good fortune of education, of being raised by
teachers despite the workloads, who themselves are so
willing to groom us to be better and it meant that we were
given the basic tool in life to navigate the modern world.
We all are privileged and it is important to keep that in
mind especially especially during our time of learning . We
are not
attending the school out of pity for it to have students, we
are attending it so that we can become better than before.
And so for me accepting my privilege has made me see
that these people has made me who I am, I appreciate and
adore my teachers and I wish I could go back and perfect
my wrong doings of the past , for even though they never
had perfect conditions they tried molding us into perfect
beings. I URGE US ALL TO APPRECIATE THESE
PRIVILEGES, AND MAKE THE BEST USE OF IT.
THANKS.