Here is the city of palm dates and lively hearts; here lives his heart. It is his place, his city, his people. It is the city in which everything came alight when he arrived. Its people and its very nature loved him. Here is Mount Uhud with which he had a relation of mutual love. These narrow alleyways will recognize his footsteps.

Here will be his mosque and adjacent to it will be his small rooms.

But here in the mosque will also gather a great band of men, eager to follow him and do his bidding. With them he will have a pure relation of mutual love. He is always with them; but his special relation is with God…We will look at Prophet Muhammad’s management of his day, hour by hour, to gain an insight into the simplicity of his great life, the spontaneity of his serious life, the perfect balance between his activities and the fulfillment of complementary needs.

Change is not an easy and insignificant issue. It needs a deep insight and vision as much as will and determination. It is important here to realize that we can’t achieve all that we want and desire. Furthermore, getting what need and desire may not always be in our interest. This, of course, requires two things.

“In this treatise, we wish to present certain concepts, tools and methods that will help the family to establish communication among its members; because next to Allah’s grace, it is communication that a family needs most to have mutual understanding, cohesion and success. And we would be unfair to ourselves if we find our families disintegrating before our very eyes, when there are several books and experiences that should have helped us to protect and make them choice families, happy and strong. I have tried to make this a good addition to what circulates around of literature on child upbringing available to parents. And because this work is addressed to a very wide audience, among whom are the educated and the semi-educated, I have striven to see that my expressions are as simple as possible; even though expressing ideas that have philosophical content in very simple language could do some kind of injustice to their meaning. This is why this attempt of ours is bound to still be imperfect; but sufficient it is that I have tried to aim clearly and closely as best I can.”

The present volume of our series deals with adolescence and adolescents. It is true that much of what applies to a five-year-old applies to a fifteen-year-old, but it is equally true that adolescence does involve some real difficulties that are unique to this stage. It is as if an adolescent is passing through a violent storm that needs special training and skill on the part of the adults around him/her.

An adolescent is a child that is approximating or has gone beyond puberty. More specifically, adolescence covers three sub-stages: early-, middle-, and late-adolescence. Early adolescence starts at twelve or thirteen; middle adolescence starts at fifteen or sixteen; and late adolescence lasts until twenty one or twenty two. After this, an individual is a young adult. You can say that adolescence parallels three educational stages: middle school, secondary school, and college.