I’m writing this hoping it lands in the way it’s intended. We’ve been where you are as university students navigating western life, and we’ve lived through what comes after it too. That’s really the whole point of having people a few chapters ahead of you: to hand you something like a cheat sheet so you can find the most efficient and rewarding path forward without taking all the longer routes we did. So with that in mind, here’s what’s worth keeping close:
You know less than you think, and that’s fine
Most of you are between 18 and 23. The overwhelming majority have no grounding in the covenantal basics, no coherent study of God’s final Proclamation, and no real engagement with God’s constitutional law. On those subjects, you likely know less than you do about the GCSE topics you studied a couple of years ago. What you do have is inherited culture and the influence of populist speakers which is mostly identity politics dressed in religious clothing. That’s not intended as criticism, it’s simply where most people start. The humbling truth is that the vast majority of yesteryears’ university students find that most of what they thought they stood for as students, whether religious or political, they deeply question by the end of their 20s.
Faithfulness to God is lived, not debated
Submission to God through adherence to His code isn’t an academic exercise, it’s life! The prophetic companions didn’t spend their time in theological arguments, they lived their faithfulness through daily life. The purpose of God’s law is to effectuate God’s order in the real world. Many of you are, perhaps for the first time, tasting independence but even then you’re still cushioned by student loans, campus life, and a parental safety net not so far behind. The next two decades (and especially as your kids grow into teenagers) will bring joys and difficulties that will reshape you in ways you can’t currently imagine. Your convictions will evolve and your priorities will shift. Welcome the journey. If what you’re thinking, saying, or doing isn’t making you kinder, more gracious, healthier, and sharper in your thinking, it isn’t truth: it’s a problem. The conversations you’re having right now aren’t really debates; they’re uninformed opinions competing with other uninformed opinions. The single most valuable thing you can cultivate at university is intellectual humility. Be curious. Be fascinated. Don’t be angry.
You get played
A great deal of what circulates in university Islamic societies is driven by sectarian and political agendas operating well above your level. The salafi-sufi arguments, the ideological and political feuds, they’re largely superficial and have been running on the same script for decades, limiting students before you and shaping them in ways they later regret. A handful of Quranic verses or hadith that are selectively deployed can feel like profound religious knowledge when you have little basis for comparison. It isn’t. It’s a fragment, and fragments are greatly misleading.
Be honest about who is advising you
Many of the speakers who present themselves as guides for your life have never lived anything close to it. Many didn’t attend British universities. They didn’t grow up in your context and, by and large, they still don’t. Often, they operate in culturally insular environments entirely disconnected from the world you actually inhabit and will have to compete in. They can’t exactly teach you to navigate difficult situations because they’ve never had to. They can’t offer you markers of genuine success, material or otherwise. What they can do, and often do, is pull you into irrelevant feuds that consume the time and energy you need to grow into capable, emotionally resilient adults. You don’t need ideologues. You need highly educated, informed and experienced cultivators. When you leave university your moral mission is to take God’s covenantal order into the world, informed by divine guidance and decency. They don’t live in wider society, often they’re in an ethnocultural bubble. What many students tend to get in university are a bunch of talking points: either practically useless, or progression impeding. Be selfish about your development because it’s your future, not theirs.
What to actually focus on
Become literate in the God’s final Proclamation. You have three or four years so use them to engage with God’s final message the way you engage with your course texts. Leave legal disputes to jurists. Leave dogmatic arguments alone entirely, they’re more likely to make you a worse and unlikeable person than a better one. Practise kindness and empathy. Seek positive conversation and step away from negative ones. And treat social media with serious scepticism, it might be entertaining but it’s genuinely harmful as a diet for the mind and heart. A generation raised on it is heading toward real emotional and intellectual difficulty.
You don’t have to be different to be faithful
You don’t need to be contrary, perform religious identity, or make your “religion” a point of friction with everyone around you. University is one of the most genuinely diverse environments you will ever inhabit, and as such, it’s an ideal place to learn diplomacy, to be confident in who you are while remaining warm and approachable to those around you. Faithful and being well-integrated are not opposites – it’s a strength.
Keep perspective
University is not life, even though it can feel that way sometimes. You’re only there for a few years. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll launch a global revolution from the campus prayer room. The talking points that feel so urgent today will dissolve almost immediately after graduation, replaced by marriage, rent, career, and real relationships. However, what will remain are the friendships you made, the character you built, and the habits of mind you developed. Make sure those are the kind that launch you well.
I genuinely hope you grow into the intelligent, grounded, and principled believers you can be: people who take God’s covenantal order into the world and make it a better place for the Children of Adam. The future belongs to you.
