Alhamdulillah was an honor to be given an opportunity to conduct knowledge sharing with Engineering students from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), with my good friend and fellow podcaster from The Barakah Effect, Amir Aripin Khan.
Our topic was “Integrating the Quranic World View”, centered on few different perspectives about the practical implications about what is the Quranic worldview, and how adopting that worldview fundamentally changes our outlook in life, having practical implications in consolidating our attitude, goals, principles, and mindsets.
For such a deep, broad, and profound topic, we couldn’t possibly cover everything in a 1-hour talk. Our focus was to try to bring a few points to these perspectives to inspire them to approach the Quran as a practical guidebook for tackling challenges in life, embrace our true identity, and be optimistic with confidence how Quran improves every aspect of our lives - not just something you recite for blessings or routines during specific occasions.
Adding another layer of challenge was that the talk was during Ramadan after Asar, ~2 hrs before breaking the fast - when hunger and tiredness is at its peak. As a speaker, my personal KPI was for 80% of them to still be awake and attentive by the end!
Our approach was to deliver the topic in a way that was engaging and relatable, making full use of the dual speaker format to complement our points, through dynamic storytelling by extracting case studies from real life historical incidents, such as the 1920 Prohibition era in America that collapsed the country's economy: in comparison to the immediate sustainable success of prohibition of alcohol in Medina in 622.
In these stories, we illustrate how the Quranic view shapes us in 3 major aspects:
1. Paradigm shift: Viewing life from the lens of the Hereafter, beyond life of this world - how this fundamentally shifts our understanding of “success”, morality, accountabity, true wisdom behind calamities and hardship, and not be deceived by what people generally perceive as success
2. Real human issues like mental health and depression, and how we can leverage this understanding to elevate our resilience, determination and approach to handling difficult situations in life with confidence and optimism
3. Motivation - how the Quranic way of life elevates and improves every aspect of our lives, not just spiritually, but also in all of our goals, ambitions and day to day life.
The session ended with a brief Q&A with some excellent questions. And by my estimate I think we exceeded the 80% alertness KPI target. Yay Alhamdulillah.
Many thanks and jazakumUllahu khayran to the DNT (Dakwah and Tarbiyah) team of the Kuliyyah of Engineering (KOE) students, as well as sponsors and co-organizers Dakwah Corner Bookstore for opening up the opportunity to connect with these young leaders, and we hope that our short sharing session could spark some inspiration in them to continue this pursuit even deeper, and then these young champs would grow to become better leaders than us.
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