By: Fatema Rehmani and Ulaa Kuziez
After placing their backpacks and lunch boxes in their cubbies, students at Shajara Tayyibba group together for circle time. They start their mornings with adhkar and duaas (remembrance and prayer).
Nadia Shahid co-founded Shajara Tayyiba Islamic School in 2011 in Canton, Michigan. To foster holistic Islamic education, students are taught tafseer (exegesis), seerah (Prophetic stories), hadith (Prophetic sayings), usool al Hadith (Foundation of Prophetic Traditions) and ulumul Quran (The Sciences of the Qur’an) as individual subjects.
“When people visit Shajara Tayyiba, they say that they have not seen such a comprehensive Islamic Studies curriculum in North America,” Nadia said.
Starting from fourth grade, students are also taught word analysis.
“If you give most of our fifth grade students a plain Arabic mushaf, and you ask them to translate an ayah for you, they will not only be able to translate the ayah, they will be able to grammatically analyze each word of the ayah Inshallah,” Nadia said.
The school was originally started for students in third grade and up. Year by year, due to a demand in the community, the school was able to expand to early childhood education.
“When I started this preschool, it wasn’t my expertise at all,” Nadia said. “But when the first batch of our preschool came, a mixture of three-to-six years old, I made the curriculum for them. They exceeded all my expectations.”
The first group was able to complete a curriculum designed for the whole year in less than six months.
“That really motivated me. I said, ‘This is the age I need to work on.’ I really turned my focus towards this area, where it was three to six years old. Mashallah, they were like sponges. They absorbed everything our teachers taught them,” Nadia said.
Shajara Tayyiba is a hybrid preschool that combines both Montessori activities and traditional ways of learning. Sensory materials are Montessori staples for teaching the alphabet at a young age. Using textured letter cards, students at Shajara Tayyiba learn Arabic alongside English.
“When we are hiring our teachers, we look at their character and not at their qualifications. Because when we hire someone with good character, we can train them,” Nadia said. You have to have a background in education, but those teachers are the role models for these younger students, but those teachers are the role models for these younger students. Whether we want it or not, that’s who they’re going to follow. Even the way those teachers used to wear hijab, the younger girls wanted to wear the hijab. That’s how much they see when they’re younger. That’s when we decided that it is really the core character of the person that we’re going to look at before we hire someone.”
In the school’s Taleem and Tarbiyyah paradigm (education and nurturing), teaching students about the Oneness of Allah (SWT) is paramount. Following that, Sr. Nadia emphasizes another important value to give to children.
“[The most important value] is character-building. There’s hands down no other thing. The thing that we had made up our mind on, and we did not budge with Alhamdulillah, was that it is the character that matters the most,” Nadia said. “This is what I say to my staff in my staff meeting: ‘if you’re teaching a fifth-grader the tafseer of the Quran, and they get A grades in math and science and Hadith and seerah, and they go back home and they lie to their parents, then you and I both have failed. All of us failed.’”
Fatema Rehmani is a sophomore at Saint Louis University. Her personal philosophy is, “If you want to make the world a better place, look at yourself and make a change” -Michael Jackson. Her hobbies include baking, writing, and spending time with friends and family.