Teaching Islam To Our Kids in Japanese

Islam was introduced to Japan some 120 years ago when more than 600 Turkish visitors tried to land on the Japanese soils but unfortunately,  most of them were engulfed by a mighty storm near Nagasaki port in 1892.  Since that time, the Japanese have tried to understand Islam and its various facets.  Writers studied Islam as a religion and as a culture as well, and wrote various books for the common people in Japanese. However, the literature has been limited despite all the efforts made by various writers and scholars in over a century. Various Muslim and  on-Muslim organizations and people have written books on Islam. However, most of these books have been translations of Islāmic books written in other language such as Arabic, English, and Urdu etc.

 A major problem associated with these translations of the Islamic books is that they were written for a different culture  and in a different context which has no similarity with the Japanese culture. The japanese do not take the concept of Tauheed the way Middle Eastern and other Asian cultures do.

Recently,some Japanese Muslim authors who studied Arabic and Islāmic studies in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Muslim countries have started writing original material for their Japanese readers instead of merely translating an  Islāmic book brought form a foreign country. The biggest benefit of writing these books is that they speak to the japanese mind the way it thinks and operates and understand things.  We need more and more of these kind of these books not only for adult Japanese but also for our kids who have been grown up here in this country and mainly speak and read and write in the japanese language.

Writers like Ahmed Maeno of Islāmic Circle of Japan have written poems for Muslim kids.  However, the overall Islāmic literature in japanese language is still limited.  We need to make efforts as a community to improve the situation.