Islam and the Problems of the Youth - Paperback

by Mahdi Lock (Translator), Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan Al-Buti (Author)

The problems of the youth are not problems that are connected to them insomuch as they are problems of the community that they live in.
Sticking them to the youth is to accuse the innocent and to exonerate the guilty. To charge them with the responsibility of rising above these problems while their communities remain as they are is a very strange kind of futile behaviour.
How can that be, and what is the solution?
The answer is found in the pages of this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Imam Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Buti is one of the foremost Muslim theologians and legal scholars of this age. Born in 1929 in the village of Ayn Dewar in northern Syria, the imam moved to Damascus at the age of 4 with his father, the great scholar Mulla Ramaḍan al-Buṭi, where he received his primary and secondary education. In 1953, he joined the Faculty of Shari'ah at the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, graduating with a first class in 1955. The following year he obtained a Diploma in Education from the Faculty of Arabic at the same University. In 1958, the Imam was appointed as a teacher at the secondary school in Homs and in 1961, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Faculty of Shari'ah at the University of Damascus. In 1965, at the University of al-Azhar once again, he obtained his doctorate with high distinction and a recommendation for a teaching post. That same year, he was appointed as a teacher in the Faculty of Shari'ah at the University of Damascus, then an assistant professor and finally a full professor. He became the vice dean of that college in 1975 and then the dean in 1977. A few years later, he was appointed head of the department of Theology and Comparative Religion. In addition to his lecturing, Imam al-Buṭi wrote around 60 books covering various Islamic sciences and subjects, the most prominent ones being Fiqh al-Sirah (The Jurisprudence of the Prophetic Biography), Kubra al-Yaqiniyyat al-Kawniyyah (The Greatest Universal Sureties) and his four-volume commentary on the spiritual aphorisms of Imam Ibn ʿAṭaʾillah al-Askandari. He was also very active in teaching common believers in local masjids, especially Masjid al-Iman in Damascus, and on television, recordings of which can be found online and especially on the site www.naseemalsham.com. He also served as the imam at the Umayyad Grand Masjid in Damascus for Friday prayers, a post he held for decades. On March 21, 2013, Imam al-Buti, along with approximately 50 students, was murdered by terrorists while teaching Qurʾanic commentary in Masjid al-Iman. Despite the immense trials and tribulations that Syria was and is still enduring, Imam al-Buṭi was never dissuaded from his dedicated service to knowledge. After a funeral prayer that was attended by thousands of people, the Imam was buried next to Imam Ṣalaḥ al-Din al-Ayyubi in Bab al-Saghir graveyard in Damascus. May the Lord have mercy on him and all of us.