Islam America played a tape of a child giving a religious sermon last night. When I was a child I used to speak in a similar fashion, though my rant was more on tawheed. One day though as I was getting close to the age when children are expected to start praying, someone who wasnt ali or gary disrespected me in a way that seems sexual now but was just really creepy then, when I said he shouldnt do that he told me to enjoy myself now because in a very short time no one would care about me as a muslim that no one would listen to me.
I have two things to say about this, children who are smart should still be focusing on topics related to children not taught to recite lectures aimed at adults. A child can learn to recite anything, and believing words you dont understand is very different from experiencial knowledge of the world. I am sure that I still believe everything I was saying then, but that I would use different analogies and that I understand that the world is not so black and white as it apears to a child who has never had the urges to do the things that adults are being advised against in our speeches. The second is that learning such speaches harms the child, because I feel that if I had not be taught to be so bossy and commanding, it might have been easier to find me a home with people who were within the range of acceptable guardians of a developing human being and not left with scoundrels who werent afraid of my words.
Ok one more thing, it was obvious from that night that many people were talking about what had been done to me, they were all saying mashallah with eveyrone else and allahu akbar and subhanallah, but they were not in fear any more that their authority and ability to tell people what to do was being threatened because puberty was swift upon me and the first time I prayed they knew I would remember everything they had done, and first no one would believe me, and second they would say allah would cure me if I were a good person, and then they would lie in wait, so as my child mind couldnt process the explicit sexuality of my flashes and I could not know enough to guard my behavior against every hint of what those flashes were, they were there to point that out, they were there to make sure others knew.
