CHAPTER ONE

THE RULER OF THE FAMILY — THE FATHER

Section Three The Father's Policy in the Family

In the family, the father is, in most situations, a serious and smiling person. He is calm and peaceful, composed and steady. The father knows each of his children very deeply. He places his child's upbringing in the highest place. While his children are still at school, the father holds a general conversation with them every week. The point of the conversation is: who did what this week, and what could they not do? The children are asked in a friendly way about their school, their teachers and their friends. They are listened to. Emotional reactions are expressed to them as a kind of encouragement: “Oh, really? Mm-hmm… Wow. Well done! Come on, show me!” Even if a child says something wrong, he does not reprimand him at once; at the end of the conversation he says, “This part wasn't right.” The important point is that the most powerful force in the world that influences a child's worldview is the father's word and deed. A child never lets go of a word he has heard from his father for the rest of his life; he hangs it on his ear like a pearl and does not let it leave his heart. He imitates for life what he has seen in his father. If not today, then tomorrow; if not tomorrow, then the day after, the child comes to rely on his father's advice and counsel. Perhaps at first he does not quickly understand the value of the advice, but little by little he understands and feels it; that is, there is an innate quality in a child that does not let him forget his father's words; the father knows this deeply and never stops advising his child and adorning his words with real-life events and stories. The father is a person zealous for knowledge. He is always reading and searching and never stops this process; his love of knowledge and his enlightenment cannot fail to influence the family and his children. The father makes himself available for the weekly family meeting as much as possible; phones are forgotten, and everyone talks animatedly. As the father listens to his children, the children too learn to listen first to their parents and then to one another. The father always places the mother's status high in the family and demonstrates this both in deed and in word; he asks the mother for advice and discusses certain matters with her, and the children grow up seeing with their own eyes that the mother is esteemed and worthy of respect. The father pays strict attention to cleanliness: he makes sure that the house, the courtyard, the clothes and even the dishes are clean. He does not allow any of his children to go about dirty. The father checks whether the task he assigned has been done or not. If it has been done well, he praises his child, saying, “Barakallah”; if there are shortcomings, he corrects them, again with praise. Let the father not assign his children tasks that are heavy, hard or impossible for them to carry out; if the child cannot do it, or if the father's command is not carried out at home and the reasons and consequences of this are not examined, the father's moral authority in the household is undermined. The father struggles to preserve his dignity and respect in the family; that is, he never does anything that would be a stain on him, because being disgraced in front of one's children is hard. The father is the child's owner in the true sense; he takes charge of his child in every respect: he lets the child feel freedom and independence, and also lets him know that he is under supervision; he makes him sense that this supervision comes from attention to him. The father is never tongue-tied before his child. Let him not hold himself lower than his child. As the child approaches adolescence, the policy becomes more serious, and the child begins to sense what responsibility is.

(To be continued)

Akrom MALIK