The Budget Tells the Story. We are Failing our Teachers.
On the weight of Islamic leadership, the forgotten conversation about teacher pay, and what it truly means to invest in the future of Muslim youth.
Give the worker his wages before his sweat dries. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ — Ibn Majah
These were among the last words of the greatest Prophet(ﷺ) who knew that justice in this life begins with how we treat the people who work for us. On the surface, it is a directive about punctual payment. But when you sit with it longer, as leaders should, you begin to understand that it is about something much deeper. It is about dignity. It is about recognizing the full weight of what someone gives when they give their labor, and compensating them in a way that truly honors it.
In the context of Islamic schools and organizations, this hadith is not a footnote. It is a mirror. And for too many of us in leadership, the reflection is uncomfortable.
If you sit on a board, lead an administration, or hold any position of authority over an Islamic school or organization, you carry something that most people will never fully appreciate: the power to shape the trajectory of Muslim youth for generations. That is not a small thing. The decisions you make about staffing, about salaries, about what gets funded and what gets cut, those decisions are statements of value. They tell your teachers, your families, and your community exactly what you believe matters most. And right now, in too many of our institutions, that story is not one we should be proud of.
The decisions you make about what gets funded tell your community exactly what you believe matters most.
Point One
We cannot want it all without paying for the people who make it possible.
There is a version of Islamic education that families dream about: a school where children memorize Quran, love their deen, and also graduate fully prepared to compete in any academic arena. Where Islamic values are woven seamlessly into every subject, not just during Quran class, but in science, in literature, in how children learn to think and question and reason.
That vision is not impossible. But it requires teachers who are both well-trained in pedagogy and deeply grounded in Islamic knowledge. And right now, we are not building pathways for those teachers to exist. We are not funding teacher certifications. We are not investing in professional training. We are not creating pipelines that make it possible for a young Muslim who loves both their deen and teaching to actually sustain a life in this profession.
And then we wonder why our schools struggle to have it all.
A trained teacher changes a classroom. Strong pedagogy means children are not just sitting and receiving, they are thinking, building, applying. When you layer Islamic teaching onto that foundation, you get something extraordinary. But that combination does not happen by accident. It happens when leadership decides that teacher training is a budget priority, not an afterthought. We must pay for that training and commit to hiring people who have it. That is how you build the school families are dreaming of.
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Point Two
The classroom must come before the technology, the facility, and the outreach.
Walk into many Islamic schools and you will find beautiful lobbies, new technology carts, fresh signage, and active social media accounts. Walk into the classrooms and you will sometimes find teachers who have not had a professional development session in years, who are working without instructional support, who are underpaid and stretched thin.
The budget tells the story.
When we spend on what is visible before we invest in what is essential, we are signaling a fundamental misalignment of priorities. Technology is a tool. Facilities matter. Outreach builds community. But none of those things educate a child. The teacher in front of the room does. The quality of the learning experience, the depth of the relationship between educator and student, the rigor and care with which content is taught and assessment is used to inform instruction, that is where the Muslim child either thrives or falls through the cracks.
Leadership must have the courage to realign the budget around the child first. That means before the next capital campaign, before the next equipment purchase, before the next rebrand: look at what your teachers are paid, what support they receive, and what the learning experience actually looks like inside your classrooms. If those answers are not strong, everything else is decoration.
Technology is a tool. Facilities matter. But none of those things educate a child. The teacher in front of the room does.
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Point Three
Examine what you actually believe about teachers. Your answer matters more than you think.
This is the conversation no one wants to have out loud in our communities, so let us have it here.
There is a quiet, rarely examined belief system operating in many of our Islamic institutions and households. It sounds like this: teachers knew what they were signing up for when they chose this profession. Or: most of our teachers are women who have a spouse bringing in the real income anyway. Or perhaps most revealing of all: we need teachers to educate our children so that our children can grow up and pursue careers we actually value, and teaching is not one of them. We need educators who will shape our curriculum and reclaim our narratives rather than continuing to hand our children stories written by others, where some truths are distorted, omitted, or hidden altogether
These are not fringe ideas. They are embedded in the salary structures of many of our schools. They are embedded in the way we talk about the profession at our dinner tables. And they are embedded in the quiet ambitions we hold for our own children.
So ask yourself honestly: Do you respect educators? Not in the abstract, feel-good way. Do you actually respect what they do, what it demands, what it costs them, and what it produces? If your answer is complicated, you may be part of the problem. And if you would feel a quiet disappointment learning that your child wanted to become a teacher, especially if your concern is their financial stability, then sit with what that means. Because that concern is legitimate only if we accept that the teaching profession does not pay well enough. And the only people who can change that in Islamic schools are the people reading posts like this one and choosing whether or not to act.
We cannot extract from teachers the most important work in our community and then treat it as the least compensated. We cannot ask them to raise our children in the deen, shape their character, develop their minds, and then tell them through our budgets that their labor is worth less than what the market demands. That is not Islamic. And it is not sustainable.
The Future Is Built in the Classroom
Leadership in Islamic organizations is an amanah, a trust. The Muslim children in our schools are not just students. They are the future of this deen on this soil. Whether Islam remains vibrant and grounded here, generations from now, depends in no small part on the decisions being made today in board rooms and budget meetings that most families never see.
Pay your teachers fairly and generously, in a way that reflects the value they actually provide. Fund their training. Build pathways into the profession. Center the classroom in every budget conversation. And examine, honestly, whether your values truly align with the words you say about the importance of education.
The Prophet ﷺ told us to pay the worker before the sweat dries. Our teachers have been working for a long time.
It is time we honored that.
Author: Farheen Beg Mohammad, Chief Education Consultant, ILMA Consulting
