The New Imams | Aida Alami

For years I’ve been engaged on a documentary movie about younger Muslims in France, centered on the 2017 trial that convicted a police officer of killing a younger French Arab man some years earlier. In 2016 I interviewed Yasser Louati, a civil rights advocate and political analyst. A former pilot, Louati turned one in every of France’s most outstanding voices towards Islamophobia, founding an antiracist group known as the Committee for Justice and Liberties in 2017.

Most imams in France, Louati stated after we talked final yr, come from nations in North Africa or the Center East or South Asia “where religion is at the service of dictatorship” and have gotten used to deferring to the state. So far as he may inform, such leaders had put up little resistance to the discriminatory legal guidelines that France’s legislature has handed towards Muslims in latest many years, such because the 2004 ban on carrying the hijab in colleges. Overseas imams working within the West, he insisted, have a vested curiosity in “depoliticizing” their congregations, “making religion about superstitions and rituals.”

Louati advised me that, for an alternate imaginative and prescient, he saved turning to Malcolm X, whom he had found when he noticed Spike Lee’s biopic on the age of twelve. Rising up, he stated, he wasn’t used to listening to a Muslim talk about liberation. In Lee’s portrayal of the American civil rights chief, he discovered a follow of Islam that aligned together with his understanding of social justice and equality.

It was hardly shocking that Louati seemed to america for a extra socially engaged imaginative and prescient of the religion. Muslims within the US are among the many most culturally, ethnically, and racially numerous on the planet. Surveys have proven that by 2040 they may comprise the nation’s second-largest non secular inhabitants (after Christians), due each to elevated immigration from Muslim-majority nations and to an increase in conversions. They’ve additionally been repeatedly vilified in mainstream American discourse. That animosity intensified nonetheless extra sharply within the aftermath of the September 11 assaults; it soared once more after the Hamas assaults of October 7, 2023, and the start of Israel’s warfare on Gaza.

Each these elements have put Muslim American religious leaders—imams, who serve in mosques, and chaplains, who function in multifaith environments—in a distinctly delicate place. The escalating Islamophobia of the previous twenty years has required them to broaden their remit far past that of their counterparts in Muslim-majority nations: not solely do they should present religious steering, they should assist their constituents navigate bigotry, surveillance, and stigmatization in a society that retains insisting they show their humanity.

At the same time as these Muslim American religion leaders face mounting challenges from with out, many are additionally navigating shifting dynamics inside their congregations. Society within the US has been steadily secularizing as many worshippers drift away from institutional authority, and Muslim communities are not any exception. Youthful believers have recently been pushing for extra pluralistic practices of their mosques, from gender-inclusive prayer areas to interfaith outreach and neighborhood packages like psychological well being and drug habit companies.

Imams who did their non secular training overseas typically wrestle to adapt to those circumstances. Up to now fifteen years a cluster of establishments have emerged within the US with the aim of addressing that downside by coaching a brand new technology of Muslim American non secular leaders. Texas has the Islamic Seminary of America simply outdoors of Dallas, based in 2011; Massachusetts has the Boston Islamic Seminary, established in 2018; and, in Illinois, the Bayan Islamic Graduate Faculty, a seminary based in 2011 by the Claremont Faculty of Theology, gives periodic in-person coursework to complement the web courses it conducts year-round. All nonprofit and nondenominational, often with comparatively small cohorts of scholars, they generally collaborate with Christian seminaries to encourage interfaith dialogue.

I watched these establishments emerge with curiosity. Born and raised in Morocco, I had by no means thought a lot about what it meant to be Muslim till I moved to the US for faculty in January 2003, on the top of the “war on terror” and the Islamophobia it stoked. On my second or third day within the US, I stood in line out within the chilly on the Federal Plaza constructing in downtown New York together with 1000’s of different Arab and Muslim foreigners who had been ordered to register their presence with the authorities. Everybody there knew nicely what it felt wish to be singled out due to our faith and ethnicity.

Over the next twenty years, I believed more and more concerning the necessity—particularly in tough instances for Muslim communities—to have a community of clerics who couldn’t solely fulfill a non secular want but additionally take part within the battle for civil rights. As a brand new technology of imams was being educated within the US, I discovered myself questioning about their lives and backgrounds. What may they inform us concerning the shifts underway in Muslim American id?

Within the fall of 2023 I made a decision to look at 5 days of courses at Bayan, which was internet hosting its triannual two-week intensive on the Chicago Theological Seminary that October. I discovered a neighborhood there that was directly deeply related to its roots and experimenting with new methods of educating the religion. “Islam in Africa looks very African,” the college’s founder, Jihad Turk, advised me in one in every of our many conversations, from “the cultural sentiment” it embodies to the garments its practitioners put on. “Islam in India looks very Indian. What does it mean for Islam to look very American?”

In a recording of one in every of Bayan’s on-line programs, the scholar Sherman Jackson begins with a provocative train. “By a show of hands,” he asks the category, “how many people have heard of Lamine Kebe?” Silence. “What about Yarrow Mamout?” One scholar raises a hand. “Omar Ibn Said?” Just a few extra comply with. “Frederick Douglass?” Each hand goes up. “The first Muslims in America were Black Africans,” he goes on, “but nobody has heard of any of these people.”

These first Muslims within the territory that may grow to be the US had been West African slaves who had been introduced to North America beginning within the sixteenth century. In his 1831 autobiography, the one recognized narrative of an enslaved individual within the US written in Arabic, Ibn Stated—a extremely educated scholar from a Fulani household alongside the Senegal River—recalled the years earlier than his captivity:

I used to stroll to the mosque earlier than daybreak, and to clean my face, head, palms, ft. I used to carry the midday prayers, the afternoon prayers, the sundown prayers, the evening prayers…. I reside in our nation right here due to the good hurt. The infidels took me unjustly and offered me into the palms of the Christian man who introduced me.¹

Within the early twentieth century Muslim American teams fashioned that outlined their non secular identities across the expertise of Black wrestle. Amongst them had been the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Neighborhood, and most famously the Nation of Islam, which had a central half in shaping Black Muslim id. One of many greatest mass conversions of African People in US historical past befell after W. Deen Mohammed succeeded his father, Elijah, as the top of the NOI in 1975 and overhauled the motion’s teachings to align with these of mainstream Sunni Islam. (Later, underneath Louis Farrakhan, the motion would recommit to a few of its extra separatist ideology.) Malcolm X himself famously foreshadowed this shift towards an Islam with extra numerous adherents in his extensively distributed letter dwelling from the Hajj in 1964, which describes how his time there profoundly remodeled his angle about the opportunity of cross-racial solidarity:

There have been tens of 1000’s of pilgrims, from all around the world. They had been of all colours, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. However we had been all taking part in the identical ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to imagine by no means may exist between the white and the non-white.

Spiritual instruction for African American Muslim leaders throughout these many years was typically essentially casual, given the absence of institutional assist. Omer Bajwa, one of many early cofounders of the Islamic Seminary of America and the director of Muslim Life at Yale College, advised me that Black American clerics did essential work with “limited knowledge and formal training and exposure,” from main prayer in mosques to serving as chaplains in prisons, hospitals, and the army.

In the present day a couple of fifth of American Muslims are Black. They pray alongside the kids and grandchildren of immigrants from Muslim-majority nations, who began arriving within the US in larger numbers after the abolition of immigration quotas in 1965. These newer arrivals constructed mosques, imported imams, and in some circumstances acquired their very own superior training in nations with established Muslim establishments, comparable to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. There they might make a rigorous research of the Quran, be taught Arabic, and discover varied interpretations of Islamic regulation, typically returning with this information to steer nascent congregations within the US.

At the same time as these establishments have taken form, they’ve but to place ahead a shared imaginative and prescient of what American Islam ought to appear like. “Islam is the most disorganized organized religion,” Turk advised me. In Sunni Islam there isn’t any established hierarchy amongst non secular authorities. Turning into an imam typically includes acquiring a certification from a neighborhood mosque, seminary, or nationwide or worldwide establishment, and each mosque, in keeping with Turk, determines its personal standards: some require memorizing the Quran (often called changing into a hafiz); others don’t. Casual coaching of imams stays prevalent. In line with a latest survey, simply half of American mosques make use of a full-time imam; of these religious leaders, in 2020 nearly 1 / 4 had been born within the US, a rise from 15 % in 2010. But most of these American-born clerics nonetheless went overseas for coaching; solely a handful obtained their Islamic levels at dwelling.

A number of members of the neighborhood I interviewed confused that this was a significant distinction. In majority-Muslim nations, non secular studying is a part of on a regular basis life and woven into the dominant social conventions. In Kenya, to call only one instance, it’s deeply intertwined with Swahili tradition, which mixes African, Arab, and Persian influences. Spiritual festivals like Mawlid, which marks the prophet’s delivery, are celebrated there with Swahili poetry, drumming, and processions—a distinctly native expression of Islamic devotion. In such locations Islam “is just in the air,” Bajwa stated. “You hear the call to prayer; you are surrounded by religion.” For imams, which means “the community already knows your function.”

The duty of imams within the US is markedly totally different: to information their congregants by civic life in a rustic whose dominant tradition is secularizing, pluralistic, and systematically Islamophobic. This places a heavy burden on non secular leaders who’re additionally striving to bridge generational and cultural variations and declare an vital place within the lives of their congregants. “You have to do interfaith [outreach], answer the media, do counseling, get the youth engaged,” and attend to their psychological well being, Bajwa advised me. The result’s typically, as he put it, “high burnout.”

If clerics working within the US want grounding within the “cultural realities of America,” as Bajwa advised me, what would it not imply to coach them? Solely up to now twenty years have formal establishments been based with that mission in thoughts. Bayan, the primary accredited Islamic graduate seminary within the US, had an unlikely level of origin. In 2009 the Claremont Faculty of Theology, a Christian seminary, was promised grant funding from its benefactor David Lincoln—a businessman and philanthropist with a staunch dedication to interfaith training—to create a multifaith consortium. That very same yr, representatives from the college reached out to Turk and requested whether or not there was a Muslim establishment to accomplice with. He advised them, he recalled to me, that no such factor existed but—“and they needed one.”

Born in 1971, Turk was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, by a white Christian American mom and a Muslim Palestinian father who arrived within the US from Jerusalem at seventeen. “Culturally speaking, we grew up in a very American household, but with some Arab and Islamic flavor,” he advised me in Chicago. He realized to wish and to talk a bit of the Palestinian Arabic dialect; together with his 4 siblings, he attended small Sunday faculty courses at a personal dwelling. “I used to try and negotiate with my father on how I could avoid going to Sunday school,” he remembered, as a result of “that’s when football would be on television.” By age nineteen he may learn the Quran very slowly in Arabic, however with out actually understanding it.

Rising up he and his siblings attended a Muslim summer season camp in California, one of many first within the US, and later the Muslim Youth of North America’s winter program in Plainfield, Indiana, the place Turk met younger students from Sudan, Pakistan, and different Muslim nations. Intrigued by his campmates, he began studying extensively about faith. When he enrolled at Arizona State College in Tempe it was to review engineering, however he additionally took programs in philosophy that, to his dismay, skipped Muslim thinkers.

In school he grew more and more within the Islamic custom and resolved to be taught extra Arabic. When he met an imam from Guyana who had realized the language on the Islamic College of Medina in Saudi Arabia, he noticed a path to satisfying his rising curiosity—so he withdrew from ASU and enrolled on the Islamic College as a substitute. “I wanted to have access to the sources so I could understand them in their original form,” he advised me just lately. He was additionally drawn to Saudi Arabia, he stated, as a result of on the time “the dominant influence in Muslim communities in the United States was an expression of Salafi Wahhabism,” a conservative and inflexible interpretation of Islam with roots in that nation; he wished to know it extra absolutely, whilst he thought it missed one thing of “the essence of the faith.”

He arrived in Medina in 1990, not lengthy after the beginning of the primary Gulf Conflict. On the austere campus he met college students from all around the world; he had roommates from Cambodia and Zimbabwe. However he was keenly conscious of his personal nationwide id: a cousin from his mom’s aspect was stationed with the US army in Riyadh. One evening, strolling within the desert underneath a full moon, he realized he was an “American kid” who belonged at dwelling. “The war was raging, and I said, okay, I want to come back and change my major from engineering to Islamic Studies and Arabic,” he advised me. “I want to become a professor and teach the classes that I wish I could have taken.”

He spent two years at UC Berkeley, one other yr in Tehran learning Farsi, and eight years at UCLA, the place he pursued a doctorate however by no means completed this system. (He would get a doctorate in training years later from the College of Southern California.) By the point Claremont approached him in 2009 he had been working for 4 years because the imam of the Islamic Heart in Los Angeles, doing interfaith work, internet hosting packages to draw younger professionals, serving to {couples} get married, and organizing a meals pantry. When Bayan launched two years later, it had three college students; now it has about 120.

Since 2019 Turk and his college students have convened for a few weeks 3 times a yr on the Chicago Theological Seminary. A few of the college students I met there have been already imams or chaplains—lots of them ladies—or labored for nonprofits; all had been clearly hoping to tackle extra important management roles of their communities. For a lot of of them this was an intensely private undertaking: a number of recommended to me that they’d struggled to reconcile their households’ cultural identities with their very own.

It was chilly and wet, however a bunch of us nonetheless went for a ship trip. Faraaz Yussuf, thirty-seven, who does fundraising for the college, joined together with his spouse, Sarah. She had grown up in Lahore and moved to the US as a youngster; he was born within the states to folks who had immigrated from India. Throughout a lot of his childhood in Minneapolis, he attended the Friday night Quran recitation on the native Masjid and Sunday faculty on the Islamic Heart. For his dad and mom, Yussuf stated, going to the mosque “was what preserved the culture they brought with them.” But it surely was a tradition to which he struggled to belong: international imams typically didn’t converse English nicely or used references from one other period. It took time, he advised me, for him to search out friends and mentors who may assist him really feel like himself within the religion.

I heard a parallel story from Bilal Elsakka, a working imam and present Bayan graduate scholar, who grew up within the San Francisco Bay Space with a white American mom and a father who had spent his childhood in Egypt. They met in Germany whereas touring and later reconnected within the US, the place his mom transformed. Elsakka went to an Islamic faculty full-time till the eighth grade, when he moved to a public faculty. When he was sixteen, his dad and mom ended their twenty-two-year marriage and his father moved again to Egypt. Elsakka needed to work to assist assist his mom and two brothers; they moved from an enormous home to a tiny condo with no fast household close by. Struggling “to make sense” of all of it, he remembered, he picked up a biography of the prophet Mohammad. Discovering Islam provided “so much peace and meaning,” he advised me. “I want to share that meaning.”

By 2012 he had a university diploma in communications however was learning day by day to be taught the whole Quran in Arabic. He was employed because the youth coordinator at a area people group, educating faith programs and delivering the Friday sermons. To qualify as an imam he obtained not a written doc, he stated, however a “grassroots certification”: his mom labored at a neighborhood Islamic faculty, the place the neighborhood trusted and revered her and was thus fast to embrace him. Within the fall of 2013 he turned the imam of the West Valley Muslim Affiliation in Saratoga. These had been difficult years for the religion: younger individuals appeared to be “leaving Islam left and right,” Elsakka advised me, in some circumstances as a result of they didn’t really feel welcome within the mosque. His comparatively accessible American background, he thought, was a part of his attraction.

Shazia Aslam, a household drugs doctor from Minnesota in her forties who grew up in Karachi, echoed Elsakka’s emphasis on the necessity for what he known as a “homegrown” American Islam. She enrolled at Bayan in order that she may go what she realized on to her 4 daughters. “I don’t want them to feel…inferior while they’re here” within the US, she advised me. “They are born here. They’re gonna be here.”

I had initially approached Turk with the thought of documenting the emergence of a distinctly American type of Islamic non secular and cultural pondering. Solely as we spent extra time collectively did the complete implications of that query become visible. I arrived at Bayan 5 days after Hamas attacked Israel and Israel started its devastating army marketing campaign towards Gaza. Israel’s warfare on the Strip was driving Islamophobia within the US to new heights: the next July the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) would report that it had gotten 69 % extra complaints within the first half of 2024 than it had over the identical interval a yr earlier than. After I visited Bayan the vitality was quiet, heavy with an unstated consciousness of the unfolding tragedy in Gaza and the rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment.

On the final day of my journey Turk went to Bridgeview, a Chicago suburb with a neighborhood often called “Little Palestine” for its Palestinian inhabitants, the most important within the US, courting again to the late nineteenth century. He was there to attend the funeral of a six-year-old Palestinian boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, who had been murdered by the household’s landlord. I requested if I may accompany him.

I sat within the basement of the mosque with the ladies throughout prayer; Turk was upstairs, the place the small white coffin lay. The mosque was full of individuals carrying keffiyehs; a crowd prayed outdoors and rallied round Wadea’s father when he got here out to briefly deal with the media. “My son is a gift, my son is a martyr—and I hope that people in Gaza accept him as one,” he advised the reporters in Arabic. “They say we Muslims are criminals and terrorists and Israelis are heroes.”

Turk hardly ever confirmed emotion within the days we spent collectively in Chicago, however typically it appeared to me that behind his outward optimism he felt powerless over the violence in Gaza and the more and more hateful and dehumanizing discourse it had impressed towards Muslims and Arabs within the West. Within the days after the beginning of the warfare, his brother, Omar, who lives in East Jerusalem, despatched him a video. It confirmed Omar cheerfully enjoying with a canine and his grandson. Turk learn me the textual content: “If anything happens to me, send this to the world.” As Turk held out his telephone, I noticed a flicker of heartbreak on his face. He was coaching his college students to serve a neighborhood that had arguably by no means wanted them extra—and surrounded by reminders, huge and small, of simply how a lot they had been up towards.