Friday, 1 June 2007CAIRO ÔÇö Wearing street clothes most of the time, playing pickup basketball with teenagers and familiar with the hip-hop culture, home-grown imams are the favorite to the young Muslim generations in the US as they always have answers to many of their curious questions about life and religion.
"The problem is that you have a young generation whose own experience has nothing to do with where its parents came from," Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in the Near Eastern studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, who surveys Muslim communities, told The New York Times in a report published Friday, June 1.
Muslim imams in the US have long arrived from overseas. But most of them rarely speak English and are unfamiliar with the American culture and unable to satisfy curiosity of US-born Muslims, the paper said.
"Foreign imams, because of the culture in their countries, kind of stick to the mosque and the duties of the mosque without involving themselves much in the general community," said Ronald Smith, a 29-year-old native imam who runs the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, Florida.
"The hip-hop culture is difficult to understand if you have never lived it," added Smith, who reverted to Islam at 14.
There are between six to seven million Muslims in the US, less than three percent of the country's 300 million population.
Relevant
Now the young Muslim generations are seeking homegrown imams as they can talk about a wide array of religious and social issues like Zakat, prayers, dating and drugs.
"My main objective is to make Islam relevant," imam Yassir Fazaga told the Times.
Every Friday, Fazaga dots his traditional Islamic code of dress to deliver his weekly sermon at the mosque in Mission Veijo, California.
Asked by youths about Valentine's Day, he talks about how the Noble Qur'an endorses love within certain ethical parameters.
He also gives advice to teenagers asking about addiction to Internet pornography and sexual orientation.
Fazaga counsels adolescents ÔÇô gay and straight ÔÇô that sexual attraction is natural. But he says to act on sexual attraction is wrong and that any addiction should be treated.
US Muslim youths say they are alienated by narrow-minded and hardline imams, who would simply admonish the youths that something was forbidden, subject closed.
Gihan Zahran, 43, cites an Arab imam who told a teenager that wearing Nike shoes was "haram" without explaining why.
Hard to Find
But the big problem is that homegrown imams are hard to find in the US, the paper said.
Many of the imams leading prayers in Friday and congregational prayers are volunteers including doctors and engineers, who have sketchy information about religion.
Parents are part of the problem as they discourage their children to graduate as imams.
"Immigrant parents want their children to become doctors, engineers, computer scientists," Bazian said.
"If you suggested that they might want their kid to study to become an imam, they would hold a funeral procession."
Experts say that being imam needs thorough academic studies.
"Ultimately, in the absence of trained imams, good religion in many American mosques has come to be defined through rigid adherence to rituals," Khaled Abou El-Fadl, professor of Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said.
"It's ritual that defines piety."
Several European countries have recently introduced training programs and teaching courses to groom home-grown imams.
The British government unveiled in April a new project to teach home-gown imams to become role models for the younger generations.
June 1, 2007
Islam Online |
Friday, 1 June 2007
US
|
|
