6 Imam Of Islam

[Aron Eugine]

It may also refer to the Muhaddithūn or scholars who created the analytical sciences related to Hadith and sometimes refer to the heads of Muhammad's family in their generational times due to their scholarly authority.[2]

Imams are appointed by the state to work at mosques and they are required to be graduates of an İmam Hatip high school or have a university degree in theology. This is an official position regulated by the Presidency of Religious Affairs[3] in Turkey and only males are appointed to this position, whilst female officials under the same state organisation work as preachers and Qur'an course tutors, religious services experts, etc. These officials are supposed to belong to the Hanafi school of the Sunni sect.

In the Shi'a context, an imam is not only presented as the man of God par excellence, but as participating fully in the names, attributes, and acts that theology usually reserves for God alone.[4] Imams have a meaning more central to belief, referring to leaders of the community. Twelver and Ismaili Shi'a believe that these imams are chosen by God to be perfect examples for the faithful and to lead all humanity in all aspects of life. They also believe that all the imams chosen are free from committing any sin, impeccability which is called ismah. These leaders must be followed since they are appointed by God.

Ruhollah Khomeini is officially referred to as Imam in Iran. Several Iranian places and institutions are named "Imam Khomeini", including a city, an international airport, a hospital, and a university.

It has been an interesting journey! Today in my mail I saw that a friend of mine, one of the imams in the area (Faizul Khan), has written a book about his own journey. I can relate to that because he's one of the early imams that my father and I met as he asked my father, God bless his soul, to give a sermon at the time in his mosque in Silver Spring.

My father grew up in the village, and then by luck went to Cairo to pursue his academic studies, middle and high school in Cairo and then university at Al Azhar. He was a true scholar and graduated as one of the top of his class. In his 20s, he married my mother who gave him five children. I'm the middle child; I don't know what that says about me!

God has the best plan. My father got sick and therefore we came to the United States, for a kidney transplant. I was supposed to be the donor, but my tissues did not match the blood type. My father got a kidney here, in the Washington Hospital Center. He died in 1990, and I took his body back to bury him in Sudan. After that, I came back to the US and continued my studies. In 1996, I met my wife and in 1997 we get married. Now I have five daughters. The oldest is doing her PhD, in American culture at Michigan University. And the youngest are twins, 10th graders.

I studied in Sudan, mostly in Islamic studies. Here in the US I went to the University of Maryland, to study sociology and psychology. I wanted to combine theology with contemporary social sciences, to understand human behavior. In my Islamic studies in Sudan, my father had insisted that I and my brothers pursue contemporary matters alongside Islamic sciences. One thing that I learned from him is that you must apply text to context. If you are not understanding the context you are living in, then theology becomes a matter of the past. Thus you have to be able to apply the theology to the contemporary.

My father had given several sermons at the Islamic Center, Washington, DC and took some classes there when he was in America. When he passed away and I came back to the United States, I was offered a job to work in the Center and I worked there for some time. Then in 1997 I joined ADAMS Center 1997, the year that I got married. And I have been with the ADAMS Center since then.

When I joined ADAMS Center, the majority of people were South Asian, but Arabs, white American converts, and African Americans were also part of the community. The number of people increased tremendously during the IT boom during the Clinton time, when many people from India, Bangladesh and so forth came to live in the Western Huntington area. All of a sudden we saw the numbers of attendees of our mosque increase. Then we started getting requests from various communities to establish a mosque in the neighborhood. We now have seven branches of the mosque. That's why I was talking about 15,000: 5,000 families, 15,000 people or more.

Most Friday sermons are now given by second generation people, born in America. We have to do 24 sermons every Friday: three of them in the main center and then each branch, about three sermons. I have had to train people to do the sermons: we have a list of 44 preacher teachers. Some of them are medical doctors, called in Christian or community terms a lay person. They are the ones who give the talks. The same is true for social services, where we have an army of volunteers.

We have been off and on online. I had been teaching an online class on Wednesday nights before COVID. I taught it from different places. One time I taught the class from the Vatican, from Rome, one time from Mecca, once from Sudan. But after COVID, I had to learn more about the skills of Zooming. I had to increase my awareness of technology. I was trained by some young people, telling me what it means if Zoom fails, how to go to Google Meet and also to a different platform.

I was in Mecca with my family about two weeks ago and I was quarantined for one week because as we were coming back, I tested positive and therefore had to stay behind, quarantined for a week in Saudi Arabia. I didn't have symptoms, though. Thus I can tell people, in personal terms, that they need to be vaccinated and take a booster. Some people are not adhering to having their mask on and those kinds of things. Thus you must take this vaccine very seriously. Imagine if I had not been vaccinated.

We have also come to know that when you have people coming together in congregation, you'll come to know who's sick, who's in need. They may apply for financial help, or they look to our social services to the community. We had to knock on doors to ask how everyone is doing, those kinds of things. We made a public announcement for food drives so that people can come and pick up their food and so forth.

You have to look to the mental health aspect. There will come a time when people might look back and ask: "What kind of mental health crisis was created by COVID?" People feel lonely. People feel frustrated. Many people tell me their teenagers have expressed depressive behavior because they are not in school. So many things have happened this year, and it will be years before we see recovery.

Yes, we have been able to vaccinate more than 20,000 people in our mosque. Before the pandemic, we had a free clinic that provides services to everyone (not for Muslims only, both workers and patients). That gave us a foundation to participate in vaccinations. When the initial vaccine came in, we were able to mobilize doctors and volunteers in our community to open our mosque as a center for vaccination, both in the main center and then the branches. We then formed a partnership with African American churches and synagogues, offering vaccinations together to the Jewish and Christian communities. In order for me to convince the community to vaccinate and not to have conspiracy theories, I took my vaccine on video and gave many sermons about it, as have other imams. We did a series of talks involving Muslim doctors, addressing the conspiracy ideas, for example that the vaccine would put a chip into your body or would make you not able to have children, all kind of things (poor Bill Gates, so many misconceptions about him!). You have to address all the issues. Now I see the challenge to convince families to vaccinate children, another round now of awareness that we have to work on

You have your life around the ADAMS Center, but you also have national and international roles. Can you tell us about them, starting with Senegal. I'm fascinated to know how you got into Senegal.

I volunteered in ISNA leadership for 16 years. First I was the East Zone representative. I represented that region in a council, then I became vice president, then president. ISNA in North America is one of the oldest Muslim organizations. The umbrella organization has many organizations within it, so that gave me an opportunity to work with many people across America, scholars, and activists. And that also brought me to work with our national government. And especially after 9/11, there was so much demand for Muslim leadership to get involved in interfaith or in government activities, to talk to government and officials and so forth and so on. We came to work with the White House, the State Department, Homeland Security, etc. ISNA has about 300 mosques affiliated with it, and at the time about 600 schools. It's a very large network.

Islamic schools, religious schools. There is a council for them, CISNA, that coordinates and shares curricula. They used to have an annual conference for all the educators. Islamic schools are like Catholic schools. They teach all the other subjects, math, science and everything, but they teach moral values and Islamic values as well. It's different from the Quranic schools, where people memorize the Quran only, They are regular schools with added to it religious education. They differ from, for example, Gulen schools, many of which are charter schools, which cannot teach Islamic education. Some communities have chosen to establish charter schools that serve both the Muslim and the larger community. The Islamic schools are private schools that are owned by different communities.

There are relationships between Islam in the West and Islam in the East that sometimes can be healthy and sometimes not. Let me be very open with you on this. First, it's not healthy when Eastern Islam tries to impose on Western Muslims lifestyles that look Eastern. That's why tension between identities can take place, especially among immigrants. For example, a community has been sponsored by Sudanese scholars from Sudan or Turkey or Saudi or whatever, and that community in their world views and understanding becomes very much in living the image of those Muslims who own that land. And that creates tensions. But there's a shift happening in the Muslim community in America. American Muslim institutions have become organically developed in America, even Muslim scholarship.

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