By Mubaashir Uqdah
mubaashir.uqdah@verizon.net

NATIONAL - On April 4, 2009, approximately 30 educators from different parts of the country convened via teleconference and webconference to kick-off the effort to create the long-discussed Islamic curriculum, based on the Qur'an, life of Prophet Muhammed, and Commentary of Imam W. Deen Mohammed.

This group of educators, known as the Muslim Education Professional Group, originally began as a Special Education Committee of The Mosque Cares and worked directly with Imam W. Deen Mohammed.

From their work with the Imam, they developed an educational framework for building the Clara Muhammad School (CMS) System, referred to as the "Ascension of the Soul Framework."

This framework, while still evolving, was a major step toward establishing an "Islamicly based methodology, curriculum, school culture, climate and educational policy through Imam W. Deen Mohammed's commentary and Qur'anic vision."

A new thrust has Deen initiated to take another major step forward toward the fulfillment of this vision by creating a national curriculum that describes, step-by-step from Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12, a set of standards of knowledge-content, skills and character development that Clara Muhammad School students should learn and acquire.

This curriculum is designed for a full-time school, whose foundation is the Qur'an, life of Prophet Muhammed, the Tafsir of Imam W. Deen Mohammed and all it implies, as well as exceeding state standards set for the best American schools.

CMS weekend schools will be able to take from this national curriculum those aspects of it that they are able to teach, given the size and ages of their students. Furthermore, a future project will, one day, be enacted to collaborate and make recommendations for a superior weekend/Sunday school program.

The educators used telephone conferencing technology to participate in the discussion of the curriculum project. And they used web conferencing technology to view the Creation Inspired Learning Chart and a demonstration of the Curriculum Development Tool in real time.

After Imam Kashif Abdul-Karim of Hartford, Conn., led the opening prayer and described the purpose and intent of the Conference, each educator introduced themselves and shared a little about their work and interest in joining the effort.

They briefly talked about their schools and the geographical area in which they lived. All joined the conference with an enthusiastic spirit to work together on this important task that Imam W. Deen Mohammed had desired to see for many years.

Dr. Hameed El-Amin of Alabama provided a brief introduction to the history of the development of the creation-inspired, Ascension of the Soul educational framework. This framework is described in a 60+ page document.

It incorporates all of our student's educational needs in the concept of Prophet Muhammed's Night Journey and the Ascension of the Soul, as explained by Imam W. Deen Mohammed. According to page 7 of the framework document, Imam Mohammed said, "These are steps in the evolution of man, who has to be responsible for society."

The document lists the 1* seven levels: "1) Adam - the n Original Soul, 2) Jesus and P1 John - the Spiritual Man, 3) tc Joseph - The Intuitive Man, Sl 4) Idris - Academic Man, 5) Aaron - Cultural Man, 6) E Moses — Man as Ruler of Government and Social Life, e and 7) Abraham - Ethical a Man."

The framework indicates that the Clara Muhammad ' School curriculum would be designed to ensure that its students are educated and cultivated, so that each of these levels or aspects of the evolved human being are instilled in our students' hearts and souls and then brought out of them to produce some of the most useful and gifted human beings the world will see.

Mubaashir Uqdah of New Jersey displayed the Curriculum Development Tool via the web conferencing tool, described the task at hand, and demonstrated how to use the tool to input the curriculum standards. He differentiated curriculum development from development plans (lesson plans).

Mubaashir noted that he no longer uses the term lesson plan, after educator Habibullah Saleem impressed upon him that indeed "words make people" and "we are not trying to teach our children less (lesson)."

The CMS Curriculum Development Tool provides a template with space to list each knowledge or skill that a student should learn or acquire for each grade, pre-K - 12, for each subject that is taught.

Educators select a subject and begin working on listing all of the standards, including subjects with well-defined state standards, such as reading, math, science, etc. For example, Arabic educators will define what skills students should be taught in Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, on up through 12th grade. They would define these tasks for reading, speaking, writing and listening.

Conference call participants agreed that each person would take one or more of the Subject/Content areas, which included Language Arts, Math, Science, Islamic Studies, Home and Family Studies, Health and Physical Education, Language (Arabic Fus'haa), Social Studies, and the Visual and Performing Arts.

It also was recognized that we currently have successful Clara Muhammad full-time schools in several areas of the country and that an assessment should be taken to identify what is currently working for those schools.

Beverly Yaman of Washington, D.C., volunteered to create an assessment questionnaire for educators to complete to help ensure that those
standards already identified as valuable are included in the national curriculum.

Virtually everyone on the conference call provided useful input to the process discussion. The CMS Curriculum Development Team set an ambitious goal of completing the first version of the national curriculum within 12 months. They are calling out to all who have expertise in some area of education and can make a contribution to what our students should be learning in our Clara Muhammad Schools.

You can get involved by joining the Muslim Educational Professionals Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group /MuslimEducationalProfessionals/. When you join the group, you can send an e-mail to the group address and let us know you have joined and want to get involved.

Within two to three days, we will welcome you aboard, give you a template of the tool, help you select a subject area to work in and show you how to use the tool. You will receive all e-mails posted by any member of the team.

The Conference call was brought to a close with the unveiling of the new Clara Muhammad Schools website, http://www.claramuhammadschools.org. Imam Kashif led the group on a tour of the website's features, which included a listing of our Schools, links to their websites, directions to the Schools, a calendar of events that can be shared by all of the Schools in our association.

The website includes files and documents that can be accessed by the public and by educators and will become a valuable resource for educators and the community-at-large. The site is new, so data is being added weekly. But it is live and you should take a visit.

The next meeting was set for May 3. Educators and thinkers, come join the group and help design a quality curriculum for our students. Join now, so that you can participate in the next Conference call.