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A new generation of vocal agitators — themselves graduates — petition us: “Don’t send your daughters to university!” Why? “Because they will lose their deen!”

If that were a legitimate argument against the permissibility of education, why focus on female students alone? After all — anecdotally, for that’s all we’re dealing with here — it tends to be male students who go careering off into the world of anything goes as soon as they feel free to do so.

In either case, the argument presupposes that being Muslim is something you are by default, by virtue of your upbringing, and not something that you become. But you’re not truly a believer until you choose to believe, and commit to that way of life.

It’s true that some young people are pious, having been brought up in religious homes, sent to Sunday school or madrasa every evening since childhood. However, it is equally true that many are not religious in the slightest, and have no connection with their faith, whether or not their parents are religious.

We have all witnessed this in our lives. On the one hand, we have encountered those associated with the religion by name alone, the entirety of their understanding that they must not eat pork. On the other hand, we have wandered amongst those raised by religious parents who nonetheless have no interest in faith at all, whether due to embarrassment, apathy or youthful single-mindedness.

What then happens if any of these three types of youngster goes onto university is an open question. In truth, anything could happen. Anecdotally — there’s that word again — it is at university that, mixing with different people and exposed to new ideas, many young people, both male and female, actually become more serious about their religion. Rubbing shoulders with people of similar backgrounds, they may begin to inculcate religiosity by osmosis.

Others fall under the spell of radical groups, which can go a variety of ways. For some, it might be their initial opening to a life of faith, even if through the years that follow they mellow and spurn its zealous impulses entirely. For some, it may be the beginning of lifelong devotion to that particular rendition of faith or cause. For others, it might be the source of their descent into extremism. Their response is as much to do with their own psychology as it is about the power of the proselytising group.

Still others might already be on a journey of self-discovery, seeking. They may have been agnostic, or on the fringes of faith, and liberated from their family environment, find themselves free to explore faiths and cultures they had never before contemplated. In truth, it is at university that we witness many young people becoming Muslim. I was one of them. So too — ironically — those now petitioning us not to send our own children! In my time, there were many from traditionally non-Muslim backgrounds who embraced the deen at university, amongst them both male and female.

If we are to speak of people leaving the deen, we must address the elephant in the room: that if anything at all repulses young people, it is these vocal agitators themselves, and their inflexible, harsh and hardline rendition of faith, which offers no room for manoeuvre, promoting the most odious caricature of their religion and culture. If you spend any time engaging with those struggling with their faith, or who have rejected it completely, time and again you will find them citing the views presented by these agitators as the most authentic representation of their faith.

But everyone is on a journey. Some people reject the faith in their youth, only to rediscover it in later life, due to changing circumstances or just some inner yearning for meaning. Some people flirt with religion in their youth, becoming true zealots, only to abandon it as they focus on developing their careers. Others just lead quiet, modest lives away from the clamour of activists, affecting change in their communities and themselves.

Meanwhile, some vocal agitators, once found perpetually trouncing their opponents with their hardline rendition of faith, later not only renounce the faith completely, but become darlings of the far-right, railing against their former brethren on talk radio. And so we are cursed with these two extremes: two sides of the same coin, both of them claiming that they alone have the truest understanding of faith, and anyone who does not hang on their every word has a faulty understanding of their deen.

That’s fine, but if I were to give any advice to parents, youngsters and seekers in this day and age, it would be this: “Don’t listen to those vocal agitators!” Why? “Because you may lose your deen.” Anecdotally, of course!