Khalid Nieto shares his practical approach to Islamic education in the West with NAC Agency

The Spanish educator agreed to a conversation with ACN and analyzed the challenges for a pedagogy that lays the foundations for peace in a world sifted by Western values around the surrender of capital and domination through war.

Khalid Nieto: “The more they attack, the more people open their hearts to peace, to the practice of Islam and to Allah”.

By Dolly González
Islamic News Agency
Argentina

Hajj Khalid Nieto is the founder of the Seville Mosque Foundation, educator, writer and promoter of Muslim culture in the West. He is from Seville and has spent much of his life transmitting knowledge of Islamic culture to young people and to the whole Andalusian community and the Mediterranean region. In contact with ACN, he reviewed the pillars of his pedagogical work.

Education in Islamic principles.

Khalid stresses the importance of education in Islamic principles that rethink and reflect on today’s world and clarifies that he prefers to speak of principles and not values. “Everything is put in value, Western values are those that have led to the fact that currently the world has wars and genocides because the word value is associated with the monetary and the development of a neoliberal and consumerist economy that does not develop the human sphere or pursue the principles of Islam.”

Education with Islamic principles, according to Khalid, starts from the example and the search for a teaching that improves the character of the children and young people of the community, but mainly of each one. “Nothing is transmitted that is not internalized, this is essential in the transmission of Islam. This has been the case from the beginning, from the Quranic revelation and from the beginning of the first community”.

In his book, Decisive Education, he sets out 10 guiding principles in Islamic education, but highlights the existence of two main groups for the education of young people that must be internalized by adults and educators: “truthfulness, gratitude and reflection; and in the other group, generosity, patience and moderation”.

The primary principle for the educator is truthfulness, which is related to a series of attitudes and actions that educate: “both in oneself and the fact itself. For Muslims, truth is Allah, it is the primordial principle that makes us have a referent and to have it as a way. Truthfulness involves three attitudes: righteousness, justice and equity. Qualities in which there are many deficiencies in the West and it is reflected in the political system in which we live”.

Educating new generations.

For Nieto, education in Islam must rebuild principles that make the Western civilizing model, with the Islamic imprint, recover dynamism and restore a more equitable and just society, where young people are always transmitted the Dîn of Islam: “the middle ground”. “In Islam we are taught to choose the middle way, where extremes are avoided in any attitude and in any project,” he says.

Thus, he states that a vital community is the one that transmits the Dîn or that proposes with knowledge and attitude to put it into practice: “education by example begins in desiring the same that I desire for myself in others. For the education of the new generations, it must be taken into account that it is precisely in the youth that “the Futuah or Arethe” is found, that is to say, the highest values are embodied in the youth, but they should have grown up in a community that seeks to transmit and complete the Dîn.

Khalid recognizes that youth is the time when all the energy can be directed towards transforming attitudes for the individual and the community. It is the time of life where one must act without fear and with courage, he says, and adds: “it is the time for great actions. Youth is a time when one loses the fear of existence because the young person trusts in his master, flies in the winds of destiny, lets himself go and seeks the truth in every situation, hence the importance of growing in communities that seek the common good”.

Peace education.

In a world where violence against the Muslim people is intensifying and the war against the Palestinian people continues unabated, Khalid states that “Islamophobia is systematically created and financed because they want to pigeonhole the entire Muslim population into a single word: terrorist”. “They want to engrave it with fire in our hearts, but nothing could be further from our people, from the message of Allah and from our principles”, he clarifies.

For Khalid, Islamophobia is faced by being aware of its existence, but from the Muslim community of Seville and he as vice president and founder has chosen not to react and continue showing the world the meaning and principles of Islamic life. “We must respond by acting nobly and not reacting to the messages, because otherwise they set the institutional agenda, the very agenda of life. We have to act creatively, we have to be the noble being who acts and not the slave who reacts, it’s a trap,” he argues.

Nieto considers, however, that “the best response to all those who want to pigeonhole us and make us react is to show that more and more people are entering Islam”. “The more they attack, the more people open their hearts to peace, to the practice of Islam and to Allah,” he concludes.

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