Earlier this week, ABC featured a news article about the rising demand for US-born imams. The article claims that presumably non-U.S.born imams tend to fail to relate to the younger American Muslims and American-born Muslims in general. There’s truth in it, I believe. We can’t deny, however, that birthplace is too weak of a determinant in this case. This upcoming documentary about American mosques (called Unmosqued) might shed some light on this issue. One of the imams interviewed in this documentary, Imam Shamsi Ali, I think clearly identifies where the problem lies. He says that knowledge that imams should have is “not only the knowledge of the Qur’an and the sunnah, but the knowledge of how to apply Quran and the sunnah in our own society.” Oh, by the way, the quoted imam is from Indonesia.
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