We'll Always Need Imams. But Will We Always Need Doctors?

It's Friday, it's jumu'ah, and I'm writing your khutbah

This is not the khutbah you’ll hear today. But it’s the khutbah I want to give today.

I’m still genuinely dismayed by how many young Muslims I meet who plan to be doctors. They’re convinced this is what they’re called to do, although with just a few minutes of questions, it becomes clear they haven’t given one of the most important decisions of their lives any independent thought at all. What happens if you get married in the same way? Choose where to live in the same way?

Maybe they see how well-to-do doctors are and want that for themselves. But I have a hunch that it’s the parents that are advocating this career choice and that the parents have subtly or unsubtly indicated this is not for up for discussion. A reasonable posture, I suppose, if we as parents could see with absolute clarity where the world will be in ten years’ time. We cannot, though.

I mean we certainly should not spread panic, but we should also empower our young men and women to think creatively, courageously and critically about their choices, to weigh options, to make informed judgments. Just because a career choice worked out well for a lot of people for a generation or two doesn’t mean it’ll continue to bring the same return on investment. Because here’s the thing: the world changes.

If the world didn’t change, I’d be speaking Punjabi in a village outside Rawalpindi. But the world does change, faster than we often expect. A community can only be as successful as its individual members, whose priorities then create an agenda everyone else must conform to, measure themselves against, struggle to resist, or find themselves entirely excluded by.

Now, some kids are certainly inclined to be doctors, and they should. But so many of them? I could begin to tell you why that’s bad for our community, and you should be able to guess why, in an America that’s gone to war with expertise, that is literally cannibalizing its elite institutions and long-term competitiveness, maybe we should not put all our eggs in one basket…

But let me instead just share a conversation I had with a few young men recently, which might put my perspective into perspective. We were on the topic of career choices, academic concentrations, long-term life choices.

They were all planning to become doctors.

“If you’re going to medical school because you think it’ll guarantee you a certain lifestyle, well, I would just be cautious.”

“There will always be doctors,” one of the young men said. His friends nodded in agreement.

I could’ve pointed out the math. America’s not growing that fast, demographically speaking. Most of their parents had more than two kids. If they all become doctors, well, how would that work? To say nothing of how technology might complicate that picture. “Sure,” I said, agreeing. “But how many doctors? Will the number of doctors we need stay the same? I can’t say for sure, but you can’t, either.”

Another piped up. “How can we have a world without doctors? People will always get sick.”

“That’s true,” I noted, “but that doesn’t mean the same thing in every generation.” For example: “It’s also true that when people don’t eat, they starve. Do you guys eat?”

A certain confusion. “Yeah, of course.”

“How many people do you know who hunt for food?” I asked. That particular life skill, I pointed out, went out of style a long time ago, even though for most of human history, people hunted. More recently, I explained, farming also fell by the wayside. Whereas my grandparents were kids, most people they knew were farmers. Nowadays, contrarily, I literally know zero people who farm, and yet if anything, we suffer from an excess of food. How did that career plan work out?

Then there was just silence. “I’m not saying don’t be a doctor. I’m not saying don’t listen to your parents. I’m saying: Pay attention to the world. Don’t make a major life choice based on assumptions.”

Don’t give life advice based on unexamined assumptions, either. (The whole point of philosophy might be to question assumptions.)

For us in Ohio, the school year is winding down. Over the summer, encourage your kids to think creatively about their careers. Give them chances to explore different options. Help them come to an informed choice. Help them understand that while no outcome is guaranteed, preparation is part of securing our rizq. We should be open to the world and, if anything, open to the possibility of dramatic change.

Fast and Fearful: Shariah Drift

What give kids success is not a checklist resume, a high school trajectory that looks like it was made by chasing after what someone else told you was successful, which usually leaves kids disconnected from God, community and themselves—and of course renders them unremarkable, indistinct and unhappy. We should be raising resilient, thoughtful, resourceful, compassionate and determined young adults.

That includes an ability to confront loss, uncertainty, and complexity.

Just a few weeks ago, I sat down with a young man who’s now at an Ivy League university. I asked him what the hardest part of the transition from a solid high school to an elite, globally competitive campus was. His answer was telling. “I never learned philosophy,” he admitted, “and that initially put me at a disadvantage.” (He was too late for the AP Halaqa—or, at least, I was!)

But that’s the stuff real leaders are made of. His willingness to admit what he doesn’t know suggests he has what it takes.

Do we, as parents, as teachers, as educators have that same willingness? The most important skills in life include an ability to be thoughtful, critical and reflective, to be able to turn that back on ourselves even as we apply it to the world beyond us, to recognize that who we are is inseparable from what we build, but that what we pursue has the unfortunate and unavoidable effect of transforming us, too.

If your kids feel like they had a chance to explore, get lost, make some mistakes, ask hard questions, and have some unexpected experiences, they won’t just wake up at forty and wonder what became of their lives. They will also be more likely to be the leaders our community so desperately needs, modeling communities that are inclusive and empowering, that are serious and ethical.

That reflect why we are here in the first place.

We’ve got some major crises, as a country, as an ummah, as a planet. We talk about them a lot. But what are we going to do about them? That doesn’t require we build on a scale too massive for most of us even to conceive. But it does demand we start to make choices about our choices, about what messages we pass on to our kids, about what it means to be a Muslim in the world.

But here’s the truth of it.

If we are ourselves not constantly learning, exposing ourselves to different ideas, meeting people outside of those we ordinarily engage, then that’s the message we’re sending. Comfort, perhaps, but also insularity, timidity, even self-satisfaction, insecurity, and a curious lack of ambition. Is this the Islam we believe in? That we’d like to pass on? That we believe is needed right now?

Or does this moment call for something more—which is just another way of saying, calling for us, as people, to be more? One of the reasons I love Substack is that I get to read so many different kinds of perspectives. I also see a lot of Muslims here read widely. I wonder: Do we have the ability and the desire to embody that? Do our Muslim spaces accommodate and reflect that?

Just a few weeks ago, a new coffee shop opened near our big West Chester masjid—a Moka & Co (and I love that we have this space). A few weeks from now, give or take, another one’s opening, this one a Qamaria, outside the Mason Masjid. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for these very nicely-designed spaces. If you want a place to work with good coffee, but also want to be frequently interrupted by the ummah, stop by.

I truly appreciate the entrepreneurship and the energy. I think these spaces augur one way in which the broader cultural anchors and deep ambitions of Muslimness can realize contributions that complement and heal America: an energetic, social, warm space, where you don’t need alcohol or the otherwise unsavory to meet up, have friends, and feel part of a community; they indicate what more we have to offer.

They suggest to us what more our faith could be doing. Once, when people thought of our faith, they thought of folks like Muhammad Ali.

What do they think now?

What might they think ten years from now?

In other words, I see a direction we should be moving in, the deepening of our American Muslimness. But at the same time, I wonder if the popularity of these spaces doesn’t also reveal the way in which many Muslim religious institutions put youth, socializing and big-tent community way down the list of priorities. If you don’t build it, they’ll go somewhere else.

But if you don’t build it, someone else will.

Except you can only be alive to what your community and your country needs if your ambition and aspiration is not limited to what someone else did, years ago. Even if that someone else is your parents. God bless our parents. May He take care of them and give them paradise. But we aren’t them, and they aren’t us, and those who come after us are meant to have their own journeys and stories… and careers.