Education of Your Baby During Pregnancy

This short talk opens with a striking claim: the single person with the greatest influence on whether a child memorizes and loves the Quran is their mother, and that influence begins before the child is even born. Sheikh Tawfique points to research suggesting that when a mother recites the Quran (or anything at all) during pregnancy, the baby becomes calmer and more familiar with it. As he puts it, the education of your child starts while your child is still in the womb.

To illustrate, he describes a large study of pregnant women who lived through the war in Serbia. Researchers followed their children after birth and found that babies whose mothers were more anxious and worried during pregnancy tended to be more anxious themselves, measured through heart rate and skin conductance, while mothers who experienced more peace had calmer children. His point is simple: a mother’s emotional and spiritual state is something her baby is already living inside of. Most parents have seen a small version of this themselves; newborns recognize their mother’s voice from the first day, and often the father’s too, because they heard those voices constantly in the womb. In the same way, he says, a baby who heard the Quran often before birth will respond to it more readily afterward.

He then turns to Islamic history. The early generations noticed that some children picked up the Quran remarkably quickly, and when they looked into why, they found mothers who recited the Quran a great deal. He relates that the mother of Imam al-Bukhari completed the whole Quran every three days, during her pregnancy and after, and that Bukhari memorized the Quran by the age of seven. He also tells the story of Bukhari losing his sight as a child, and his mother reciting to him constantly while making dua day and night until his sight was restored; Bukhari, he says, credited much of the hadith he learned to his mother reciting them to him.

The heart of the talk is that a mother who loves the Quran, knows how to encourage her children, and enjoys it herself will pass that love on, while a parent who does not love it cannot impart it no matter how hard they push. This is why he urges young Muslims to marry righteous spouses: the character of the home is built by the people in it.

He then widens the lens to fathers with the story from Surah al-Kahf of Musa and Khidr. Khidr rebuilt a collapsing wall without asking for payment because beneath it lay a treasure belonging to two orphans, and their father had been a righteous man. Ibn Abbas explained that Allah protected those children because of their father’s righteousness. He mentions a scholar who would tell his son, “I will increase my prayers for your sake,” meaning that the more righteous a parent becomes, the more Allah looks after their children.

He closes with a direct challenge: it is hypocritical to force children to memorize the Quran while we make no effort ourselves, like telling a child to pray while we do not. He insists memorizing and understanding the Quran is within reach of every ordinary parent, not only scholars, and that if we do not fall in love with the Quran, recite it, and learn its meaning, we cannot expect our children to love it.