Five-year-old Sadiq Asad used to resist his mother's attempts to teach him the Arabic songs she learned as a child. He was too shy or embarrassed to try pronouncing the Arabic words of the prayers that his parents and older sister recite five times a day. And he began every morning of his first year of preschool in tears when his mother dropped him off.
But all that has changed.
Now, Sadiq is a kindergartner at the Aleem Academy in Sykesville. It's the most recent of a handful of Muslim schools to open in the Baltimore area and in the Maryland suburbs of Washington as more families strive to combine the top-notch academics of traditional private schools with the Islamic teachings and values typically reserved for religious classes.
These days, Sadiq comes home singing the Arabic songs he learns at school. He is comfortable leading his classmates in their morning recitation of the sayings of Islam's prophet, Muhammad, and in parts of their midday prayer. And there are no more tears when he says goodbye to his mother each morning.
"I just like it here," the youngster said one recent morning. "I like everything in here."
Looking around the cozy, one-room school, which opened last month, it's not difficult to see why.
The area devoted to the three preschoolers and two kindergartners is brimming with library books and art supplies, puzzles and pint-sized furniture, colorful artwork and crates of costumes for dress-up time.
On the other side of the school room, teacher Munazza Bashir divides her time between two pupils -- second-grader Sabrina Asad and third-grader Adeel Malik -- flitting between their desks as she guides them through math and grammar lessons that seem more like tutoring sessions than school.
Posters of the Kaaba, the sacred Islamic shrine at Mecca, hang alongside displays of American presidents, and pupils just as eagerly crack open brand-new copies of the holy book of Islam, the Quran, as they do their new math and language arts workbooks.
The seven pupils attend daily classes in Islamic studies, Arabic pronunciation and the Quran, and pupils and faculty alike break every afternoon for their midday prayer in the salat, or prayer room.
But the Muslim faith seeps into far more than just the time set aside for Islamic studies.
It's there after snack time and after lunch, when the pupils thank Allah -- in Arabic -- for feeding them, quenching their thirst and making them Muslim.
