For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the Ghazali Children’s Project.
At a school in Birmingham, England, children take a handful of sand and let it slip through their fingers and onto the floor. This, they learn, represents how hard it is to take back something that has been said. In rural Pakistan, children float overladen paper boats in a trough, watching how they eventually turn over and sink. This illustrates how nothing remains with us after death except the state of our hearts. In Singapore, students color golden hearts flecked with smudges. This, they learn, is a sign of how innate goodness can be covered up by wrong actions, and then re-polished to shine.
All of these lessons come from the Ghazali Children’s Project, an innovative set of books, curricular guides, and online resources that teach character virtue development through the thinking of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, one of classical Islam’s most renowned philosophers, jurists, and mystics. Born in the 11th century, Ghazali taught at Baghdad’s famed Al-Nizamiyya university. His writings deeply influenced the development of Islamic as well as Christian philosophy, and the quality of his teachings led him to be given the honorific, “The Proof of Islam.” Over the centuries, Ghazali’s 40-volume magnum opus The Revival of the Religious Sciences has been regarded in the Muslim world as the greatest compendium of Islamic spirituality and ethical behavior for everyday life; it systematically lays down practical teachings and explains how the outer aspects of Islam can, through their inner meanings, change every situation into one that strengthens character.