MASON, Ohio — “I did not want to do it at all,” Aadam Zindani said with a laugh.
He’s talking about the Quran. Not just reading it, but memorizing it — about 600 pages from cover to cover.
“Memorizing it is the easy part,” Zindani said. “The hardest part is actually retaining what you memorized.”
It took him at least three years.
“For some people, it even takes decades,” said Fawzan Hansbhai, the imam at the mosque next door.
Now, Zindani is helping other students do the same thing. I stood with him in the backyard of a new school in Mason. His mom co-founded it, in large part, because of him.
Anila Zindani stands nearby, because she’s almost always here.
“Oh my God, it means the whole world to me,” Anila said. “This school is really special.”
Go inside the classroom in the video below:
She told me the idea for this school started when she looked around for places to teach her son the Quran. But, she said, there was nowhere in the Tri-State that offered it. So, Anila began memorizing it in a trailer in downtown Mason.
Now, they have the ICM Learning Academy — a charter school that does more than just teach math and social studies. I visited 30 minutes before dismissal. And after math, some students stuck around to read the Quran.
In another room, Yahya Hansbhai laughed. The assistant imam visits prisons in Warren County to offer spiritual guidance to people incarcerated there. But at the time of my visit, he was teaching the Quran at school. He told me memorizing it is part of a long tradition in his religion.
“It is still preserved in one’s heart,” Hansbhai said. “In that way, they are guarding it — every letter and every word.”
School officials here already have plans to expand next. It's something they showed me outside, where construction has already begun on a new $12-million mosque, with a larger prayer hall and new classrooms for the school.
They still need to raise millions of dollars to complete what they describe as a community center.
"This is one of the toughest things I’ve done in my entire life," Anila said.
Standing in the school's hallway, Anila smiles anyway. She put her hand over her heart as the students crowded around my camera, waving and giving thumbs ups.
“It was a huge dream,” Anila said. “And when I see those students, and when I see those teachers, it’s like a dream come true.”
For more information about the ICM's expansion project, click on this link.
