28/08/2025
Parents, educate your daughters.
Teach your daughters about Allah: who He is جل جلاله, what our relationship with Him is, and how much we are in need of Him. Teach them to love and fear Him.
Teach your daughters that their greatest gifts and talents are internal, not external. Taqwa over appearance.
Teach your daughters that their greatest role in life is that of Mother. To be a mother of believers. This blessed role extends beyond the dunya and into the Aakhirah.
Teach your daughters Quran. To read it, to recite it correctly with tajweed, to memorize it, to learn its tafseer, to ponder its meaning, to apply it to daily life moment by moment. To carry it in their hearts.
Teach your daughters the blessed seerah of Rasul Allah ﷺ, to love him and respect his hadith.
Teach your daughters the stories of the Sahaba, the male and female companions of Rasul Allah ﷺ, and their lives, their struggles, their mission.
Teach your daughters about time: how to manage time for daily activities, but also how to understand the female timeline, so very different from the male timeline.
Teach your daughters that they are born with their worth already fully intact from Allah and that they have no need to go seek it elsewhere or in the arms of random men.
Teach your daughters modesty, haya' (الحياء). In dress, in speech, in action, in comportment.
Teach your daughters manners: social etiquettes of politeness, of saying please and thank you, of being kind, courteous, and considerate.
Teach your daughters to stand on principles and to be mentally and emotionally strong enough to stick out in a crowd, if the crowd is doing what's wrong. Females naturally usually want to fit in and go along to get along; this is normally fine in a traditional Muslim society but not in a degenerate non-Muslim environment.
Teach your daughters Arabic if you can, so they can understand directly the Quran, hadith, seerah, tafseer, and other books and Islamic subjects without a mediator.
Teach your daughters the art of homemaking: how to cook healthy and delicious food, how to meal plan for a well-balanced and nutritious diet, how to clean a space, how to do laundry, how to run a tidy and organized home.
Teach your daughters the basics of childcare: how to care for a baby, how to change a diaper, how to do the basics of nurturing a child, so that when your daughter gets married and has her first baby inshaAllah, she isn't in for a total shock.
Teach your daughters that a husband is a blessing, a necessity, an important part of her life. Teach her to respect, love, honor, and obey her husband as long as he obeys Allah.
Teach your daughters that marriage is a beautiful and serious thing, simultaneously light and fun and lovely, while also at the same time a solemn covenant (ميثاق غليظ, mithaq ghaleedh, as Allah calls it in the Quran). Marriage to a good Muslim man is among the best things to ever happen to a woman.
Teach your daughters that marriage is like life: a series of ups and downs, alternating between ease and difficulty. When things inevitably get hard, don't bail on the marriage. Stay.
Teach your daughters that marriage is a relationship built on a bundle of rights and responsibilities for each party. Marriage isn't solely about feelings or constantly "being in love" all the time.
Teach your daughters that her husband is her leader, her provider, protector, guardian, imam. He owes her many rights but he is ultimately responsible for her, so he has a degree of authority over her given to him by Allah, as long as he fears Allah. Never rebel.
Teach your daughters that if things go wrong in her marriage, she must assess the situation. Small problems: work it out with your husband. Big problems: bring in fair mediators and respected family elders who can wisely guide and help the couple through their issues.
Teach your daughters that children are a blessing, not a burden.
Teach your daughters that family is more important than any other worldly pursuit: better than secular education, a job, a career, money, status, "freedom."
Teach your daughters that the husband and children need the wife and mother's loving presence much more than a cold corporation does. To the corporation, she is 100% replaceable. To her husband and children, she is utterly irreplaceable.
Teach your daughters that home is a paradise, not a prison.
Teach your daughters to be proud of being believing women. We derive our `izza (العزة: pride, dignity, honor) through Islam, not through imitating its enemies. Running after others brings only humiliation.
Teach your daughters that it's better to be a stranger in this lower life, since Islam began as something strange and it will go back to being strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.
This is the education that our Muslim daughters need.
Whatever you teach your daughters is what you are passing along to the future generations.
May Allah rectify our affairs and grant us righteous offspring, ameen!
~ Umm Khalid
