Cutting off your parents is now becoming more acceptable.

Anna Russell from The New Yorker, writes about how many people are going “no contact” with their parents. She goes through a detailed story of a girl named Amy, and it is quite chilling how this can be a reflection of the Muslim family breakdown as well: 

One day in the mid-two-thousands, a teen-ager named Amy waited to hear the voice of God. She was sitting in a youth Bible-study group, surrounded by her peers, and losing patience. Everyone else in the group seemed to hear God speak all the time, but Amy had never heard Him, not even a peep. Her hands didn’t shimmer with gold dust after she prayed, as others claimed theirs did, and she was never able to say, with confidence, “The Holy Spirit told me to do it.” She went home that evening, determined to try again the next day. A few years passed and she still heard nothing. She began to wonder if something was wrong with her. “God didn’t talk to me,” she wrote later, in a blog post. “I was afraid that meant either he wasn’t there, or I wasn’t good enough.”

Amy, the eldest of five siblings, was homeschooled by evangelical parents in the suburbs of Alberta, Canada. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was bright, and happy, and remembers days spent reading “David Copperfield” aloud with her siblings. It was only when she left for college—Ambrose University, a Christian liberal-arts school—that aspects of her childhood began to strike her as peculiar. Amy remembers her parents telling her, when she was six, that her grandparents were going to Hell because they weren’t Christians. She grew up believing in creationism, and was startled to feel persuaded by the evidence for evolution in her college textbooks. She grappled with the “problem of evil”: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, how can he allow so many terrible things to happen? “I started to diverge from my parents,” she told me recently.

Part of Amy’s original motivation for going to college, which she paid for herself, was to find a husband: she had been taught that men were better spiritual leaders than women, and hoped that a partner could help her hear God. Ambrose was socially conservative. No drinking. No sex outside of marriage. She found a boyfriend, but the relationship didn’t last, and soon she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married at all. She enjoyed her courses, and took such thorough notes that, on one occasion, other students offered to buy them. “Amy came to university like a sponge,” Ken Nickel, Amy’s philosophy professor, told me. “She wanted to understand.” On visits home, she stumbled into conflicts. During a family vacation in 2013, she told her parents and siblings that she didn’t think the Bible implied that it was wrong to be gay. “I think, naïvely, I was just, like, Oh, they’ve just never heard this interpretation,” she said. “And they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, thank you for letting us know!’ ” Instead, as Amy tells it, one of her younger brothers became upset, and quoted Bible verses to make the opposite argument. Her mother sent her a letter expressing concern for her soul. During the drive home after her graduation, it came up that Amy identified as a feminist, and her parents began arguing with her about abortion. She cried in the back seat.

Amy attended law school, and a few years later returned to Ambrose to speak at an event. While visiting, she learned from the university’s president that her parents had sent him a letter expressing displeasure about Amy’s transformation. Their daughter used to be a “Bible quizzer,” they wrote, but now “rarely picks up a Bible except to highlight the verses that she believes say the opposite of their obvious and orthodox meaning.” Her mother said that Amy had a difficult relationship with her brothers, whom she now regarded as “misogynists.” If her parents could start over, they would discourage her from attending the school. “She used to be a calm and steady young woman but now suffers from a sometimes debilitating anxiety in spite of how faithful and unwavering God is in His support and provision,” the letter read. “She has turned her face from Him towards despair.” Amy told me that learning about the letter was “destabilizing.” She wasn’t yet estranged from her family—that would happen a few years later—but she found herself visiting less often.

Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out of unhealthy family relationships without shame…

This is a concerning trend that we need to be aware of, especially Muslims. I have seen numerous sisters who were from practicing families and wore the hijab, and now have taken off the hijab and fully embraced the independent female, liberal lifestyle. 

I have also seen brothers who were from Muslim families attend college and become atheists after studying philosophy, with their parents devastated. 

I have seen parents die a little on the inside when their kids have strayed away, and I can see it on their faces. 

It’s really sad.

What we have to realize is that shaytan doesn’t start attacking people after they go away to college, but it starts from birth. We have all heard the famous hadith:

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “No person is born but that he is pricked by Satan and he cries from the touch of Satan, except for the son of Mary and his mother.” Abu Huraira said, “Recite the verse if you wish: Verily, I seek refuge for her and her offspring from the cursed Satan.” (3:36)

Source: Sahih Bukhari 3431, Sahih Muslim 2366

What happens after birth? You give your child to the daycare to raise, which has been considered criminal by even the liberal scholars like Hamza Yusuf. Then they are raised by their peers in school, then high school, then college, and then you wonder why they are totally different from you and your Islamic values. 

There is anything but Islam in these institutions, especially in college. The idea is to liberalize the people and make them pursue the mirage of self-happiness, and self-pleasure, which ironically leads to more depression.

As parents, we need to educate ourselves about the religion, and we need to also know how to defend the religion. It is not enough to just teach Islam to your families, but they need to know how to counter the constant attacks against it. The least we can do is have the resources on hand when we need to have discussions with our kids.

I have just provided you with an excerpt, but you should definitely read the full story here if the above link doesn’t work.