Casual Da’wah or Passionate ?

Casual Da’wah or Passionate ?

by Nisaar Y. Nadiadwala on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 10:35am

   During my school vacations I was instructed to attend costumers in my father’s cloth shop. Those were my earliest lessons in professional public relations. I did not begin  as the crown prince of the boss by sitting on the cash box and instructing the staff, but started cleaning the show cases, checking the bills (in those days calculators were not in vogue, so it was thought to be  a good way of revising arithmetic), and finally I was the one in charge of handling customer care.

When I look back to find out from where did I get this basic training in building human relations at the grass root level, my search ends here. I did not attend any sales training  classes, but it was a practical lesson from real life situation. Today people do post graduation in public relations and human resources. As a worker I understood the problems of my own staff and my grandfather handled them in a wise manner , which I think cannot be taught even by Haward and Cambridge. 

One of the common problems in our Da’wah  world is that we have lots of centers but very few professional da’ees who really would build up a rapport with people visiting the centers. I take up the opportunity of visiting Daw’ah centers when ever I visit a city or a country for lecture tour. I have observed the same flaws from in more than 100 Da’wah centers I have visited. Daw'ah is not casual, but it should be passionate. specially in dealing problems of the society.

   Unfortunately I have been noticing that many young aspiring Da'ees only focus on marketing them selves like a well packed gift. Well, Da'wah is serving people and not marketing your pictures and videos, photographs and other achievments. One has to learn that from helping people daily, by counseling, by providing monetary help in emergency.....rather updating your profiles and pasting your pictures ....

    Daw'ah is hard work, real hard work, and we ar popularising Islam and not marketing  our selves to be popular among young girls. The day young da'ees realise this, a new chapter of  success will be opened for them.

Author: Nisaar Nadiadwala is a speaker and writer on socio- educational issues from Islamic perspective. He can be reached at  nisaar_yusuf@yahoo.com

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