Introducing the MAS Tarbiya Mini Guides

April 7, 2010 at 10:18 am Wael Hamza 1 comment

In their quarterly meeting on April 1st, 2010, the local tarbiya directors requested that we share some of the projects we have help in accomplishing them. Our national team will start sharing some of the projects in the make and demand input and help on them isa. Let this email and post serve as the first. One of these projects is creating a set of practical guides to help all of us in our tarbiya work. Please read this long introduction below. We request you do the following.

• Read carefully and critically
• Think of any general feedback you would like to give our team
• Think of specific input you would like to see in EACH of these guides
• Share this post with your local team or anyone who can contribute to this project and encourage them to contribute
• Contact us to be part of the mt-guides team and we will use your help

As you will see below, the guides will serve all of us from individuals to the local and national leadership. We are sending this email to the tarbiya coordinators, chapter presidents, and my-directors to solicit input and recruit the team who will own this project with us isa.

Please sent an email to mt-guides@googlegr..com if you want to be part of this team, general feedback, or give specific input on what exactly you want to see on these guides

For those who will be part of the team we will send them more information on how to view the tarbiya guides wiki and we will get them in ISA

MAS National Tarbiya Team

Why this guide?

Tarbiya is an essential concept and a very important core value in the Muslim American Society, MAS. MAS believes that its success and the success of American Muslims rely on how effective we are in applying this concept in our lives. Developing ourselves in all aspects and enriching our skills and talents are key to our success. We also hold similar responsibility towards people around us and the society at large. Tarbiya can be viewed as the art of dealing with people and helping them to get better and closer to their creator, and to equip them with the needed physical, spiritual, and intellectual requirements to attain success in this life and the life after. “To move people to strive for God-consciousness, liberty and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity,” is a mission that can only be held by people who are in a constant development effort and with an ability to change people around them.However, the concept of tarbiya is quite general and often misunderstood or partially understood to say the least. In addition to that, most of what is written about tarbiya addresses it from an intellectual/theoretical point of view and lacks the practical and the implementation aspect. MAS national tarbiya team believes there is a dire need for a practical guide that helps individuals and teams to incorporate tarbiya in their respective work and make the tarbiya effort more organized and effective. These simple guides are a living document that aims at incorporating people’s experience along time. It is by design that these guides change and grow based on the experience added to them by those who are involved with the tarbiya effort on the ground. As its initial version may be incomplete and lacks a lot of crucial components, it will grow into a very practical and very comprehensive set of guides in a relatively short period of time insha’Allah.

Who should read this guide?

Everyone should read this guide. This guide has tips and suggestions for all. It will guide you through your endeavor of developing your own self. It will also help you while developing a small number of people around you such as your family, your halaqah, your MAS Usra, your MY Connect. It will help you become people’s oriented while dealing with your youth committee or with your chapter council, and even with your colleagues at work. The guide will also focus on helping people who are in charge of providing tarbiya programs to others such as the local tarbiya committee members, the local tarbiya directors, and chapter presidents. It will also help people who will join the national tarbiya team and sub teams. It can even go as far as helping the national leadership of MAS to effectively incorporate this concept in the national MAS strategies and operation.
Therefore, our target audience are:

• Individuals who are interested in developing themselves, their families, and people around them
• Mentors such as MAS Usra leaders, MY Connect leaders
• Local tarbiya committee members
• Local tarbiya coordinators and directors
• Chapter leadership and chapter presidents
• National tarbiya team members

How is this guide organized?

This guide comprises a set of smaller guides (mini guides) to make it easy for the readers to zoom in to what they are looking for. The first guide, “Tarbiya: a core Islamic value, a movement value, and a MAS core value,” aims at defining the concept of tarbiya and its value in Islam and the movement work. It also helps the reader to understand the importance of considering this value and applying it in our lives. The guide quickly describes some of the challenges that can be overcome by utilizing this concept and some of the challenges one faces while applying this concept. The guide will help the reader be aware of some of the objectives of tarbiya, and some of the methods and the tools that can be utilized to achieve those goals.
The second guide, “Personal Guide to Tarbiya,” takes the reader towards personal tarbiya, an effort every single Muslim should be concerned about. It will help the reader apply the concepts and the ideas described in the first guide for their own personal development. The guide will present the reader with extra reading resources as well as practical tools for personal development.
Moving beyond personal tarbiya, “The Mentor’s Guide,” helps the reader develop the necessary knowledge and skills to be able to offer tarbiya to others around. Those who are formally leaders of others such as MY Connect leaders, MAS Usra leaders, or committee leaders, and those who informally mentor others such as relatively senior members can benefit a lot from this guide. It gives tips and suggestions on how to perform this important work and help overcome many of the challenges faced in this area. It will present the reader with numerous case studies and real life situations. The guide also helps us understand the tools we use within MAS to formally focus on tarbiya such as MY Connect and MAS Usra with tips and suggestions of how to get the maximum out of these tools and how to make them creative and use them to solve real life tarbiya challenges. The guide also highlights the national resources that can be used for mentorship.
As MAS chapters engage in a more organized tarbiya activities, the “Local Tarbiya Team Guide,” helps the local tarbiya committee to better execute tarbiya plans for the chapter. The guide gives tips and suggestions of the best practices and structures of the local tarbiya committee, the responsibilities of this committee, and the relationship between this committee and other entities within the chapter. It also highlights the relationship between the local committee and the national team and gives suggestion of how to make the local tarbiya work synchronized with the rest of the nation. The guide demonstrates how the local tarbiya team can leverage the experience of the network of chapters around the nation. The guide helps the local committee to make a plan and synchronize their plan with the national plan. It will also come with a portfolio of case studies and problem solving tips and suggestions to help the local committee in their day-to-day challenges.
Chapter leadership in general and chapter presidents in particular are the key players in making the tarbiya effort in MAS successful. Chapters whose presidents are focused on tarbiya and incorporate it in all aspects of work are the most successful chapters. Tarbiya effort is struggling in chapters whose leadership is not focused on tarbiya. Therefore, the “Chapter leadership Guide” aims at helping chapter leadership in general and chapter presidents in particular be cognizant of their crucial role regarding this effort. It will help the chapter president make an assessment of tarbiya effort in the chapter, take the necessary strategy, choose the right tarbiya team and hold them accountable to the right job responsibilities. It helps the chapter leadership incorporate tarbiya in the many aspects of MAS work not only the tarbiya department.
At the end of those guide resides the “National Tarbiya Team Guide,” which helps MAS national team understands its role within MAS national and its responsibilities towards the tarbiya effort within MAS. It makes a clear description of national tarbiya operation and sets the model for interacting with the local crew. It also gives tips and suggestions to MAS national leadership of how to form the national tarbiya team and hold them accountable to the right measures.
It is important to note that

• Those aforementioned guides are not huge guides. They are, on the contrary, mini guides that are meant to ignite ideas, and solicit discussions.
• The guides come with numerous workshops and training material which will be mentioned in each guide. Those will be offered according to a national plan and based on chapter requests.
• They are also meant to grow and include real life experience of those who read them and implement them. They will represent the experience of those who contributed to them
• By design, those guide avoid giving detailed instruction or a “must-do” type of tips. This is due the fact that different chapters have different contexts and what fits a group may not fit another. However, details and examples will be used to demonstrate a general suggestion or to clarify an abstract concept.
• The guides are authored and published incrementally. That means some of these guides will be published while others are under development.
• All the content in these guides are for educational and development purpose. This means any rules, by-laws, policies, or procedures set by the national or the local leadership supersedes what is in these guides unless otherwise explicitly stated in the guides.
• The guide is mainly published online with a yearly printed version available for purchase. MAS national owns full copyright of the material and distribution and sharing should take place according to MAS national set policy.

How can you help make this guide better?

As mentioned earlier, this guide will continue to be a living document where experience will be added. You can make this guide better by giving the editors feedback on the material especially that which stems from personal real life experience. You can also help by giving more tips and suggestions of how to do things in a better way, or how to solve certain problems. You can also share your successful experience as well as the not-so-successful one in the platform specified by each guide. These guides will only be useful when practical input shows itself and where accumulative experience gets included. 
In these early stages of developing these guides, MAS tarbiya national is looking for those who are interested in contributing to the first edition of the guides. Please contact the national tarbiya team if you feel you can help in brainstorming, suggesting, writing, editing, or publishing any or all of these guides.

Ready, Set, Go (only for those who join the guides team)

• GUIDE 1 – Tarbiya: a core Islamic value, a movement value, a Muslim American Society’s Value (under development)
• GUIDE 2 – Personal Guide to Tarbiya (under development)
• GUIDE 3 – Mentorship (under development)
• GUIDE 4 – Local Tarbiya Team (under development)
• GUIDE 5 – Tarbiya for Chapter Leadership (under development)
• GUIDE 6 – National Tarbiya Team (under development)
• Appendix I – Personal Development Plan Example (publishing …)
• Appendix II – MAS Tarbiya Standard Map: a Snapshot (publishing …)
• Appendix III – Tarbiya Annual Meeting Manual (under development)
• Appendix iV – MAS Usra/MY Connect Frequently Asked Questions (publishing …)
• and more …

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