You become a family, and just like any other family you come to know each other intimately, warts and all. The teacher may move on to other groups and have other students (even though we are still in denial that he could have a favorite batch after us), but this is really the one group that you all have together. In fact, it’s probably even more closer than with the teacher. What I didn’t anticipate was that the bond you make with your classmates is also going to have a huge impact on you for the rest of your life.
I’m still reaping the benefits daily, and barely a day goes by that I don’t remember him and the other teachers in the program and make du’a for them.
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To that end, he not only taught me how to learn, but also how to teach. It is a very powerful sunnah to explain things to people in a way that they can understand, and he’s applied it very well. That is one of the key things that I took with me, that being a teacher is not about merely regurgitating what you know, but making it work for people. Why is that? Because he found out what gets results for people and brought it to them. What he is, however, is the English-speaking world’s most prominent figure in the field. No one will pretend that he’s the world’s highest authority in the Arabic language (and if you think that, he’ll be the first one to disabuse you of that notion!).
I still don’t agree with how he has explained some things, but what totally gets me is how his persistent dedication to his mission and his style of presentation allowed him to gain prominence over those who might know more or better than him. Of course, Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan was not a scholar of Islamic studies, but it just made sense to go to him for Arabic because it was obvious that he had created something special that works. Just by virtue of being around them, you will pick up so much. Undoubtedly, spending an extended amount of time with an experienced teacher is going to foster a relationship between you. The point is not to think that you have “arrived”, because that means your journey is over and you are done. Others had no knowledge of it and then went on to become teachers after the program. Their expectation after the program was to go on and formally study the Islamic sciences as taught in Arabic.
Some of the guys knew 80% of the grammar and morphology and saw it as an opportunity to perfect them and gain fluency of the language. So go into it with an expectation of where it should take you and where you want to go from there. What really matters is what you do after a program like that to maintain it and keep it growing. Months and months of reading, writing, listening, writing (and occasionally even dreaming) in Arabic is definitely a game changer, but think of it as a booster shot that is going to give you rapid growth in your knowledge of the language. The thing to know is that like just like with anything else, mastering Arabic is a journey. If you’re looking for gossip about on-campus hijinks, you can go right ahead and skip this one! Also I know that changes have been made in the program since then (we were the guinea pigs that were experimented on, so go on and thank us for our sacrifice ? ), but it worked for me and a bunch of others, so I’m going to go ahead and share what I experienced. It was one of the greatly transformative periods of my life that I have many fond memories of, but what I want to focus on is what an immersion program like it can do for you. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be part of an Arabic immersion program offered by Bayyinah Institute called Bayyinah Dream.