Tom Facchine – The Crisis Facing American Mosques
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of institutions like National University for their social and religious orientation and the need for input from people across the spectrum to avoid confusion and misunderstandings about who is involved in the decision-making process. They stress the need for better understanding of the demographics of the mosque and better community leadership. They also emphasize the importance of evaluating leaders and creating a culture of peer-led leadership, but acknowledge that there is a long term solution to improve the communities and empower individuals to manage the community.
AI: Summary ©
I mean, the masjid is perhaps the most
important institution for Muslims.
If you go back to the time of
the Prophet ﷺ, the masjid was, it was
everything.
And people, this is cliche at this point,
the masjid was a university, and it was
this, and it was that, and it was
the meeting place, it was the center, literally,
physically, geographically of the community, and metaphorically, figuratively,
the heart of the community.
And if we do some assessment and some
evaluation of ourselves, we don't have that.
We haven't created that, at least most of
the mosques in America aren't like that.
What they are is they're institutions where, you
know, they have a varying degree of aesthetic
quality to them, and they're pretty much, I
want to say, in the clutches of the
donor class.
Let's put it like that.
That we see the stratification and the inequality
in the Muslim community play out in the
masjid.
That the doctors, and the lawyers, and the
people who are seen as the movers and
shakers of the community, the ones who pay
the bills, the one who give the big
donations, they're the ones that kind of call
the shots in most of the mosques.
And what happens is that mosques end up
underserving a lot of other populations and groups.
They're not necessarily Da'wah oriented.
A lot of them are sort of culturally
oriented or socially oriented.
Sometimes it's worse than that.
Sometimes it's even like ethnically oriented or, and
that's not to say, I don't mean to
be too categorical because there might be some
situations where an ethnically centered masjid makes sense,
but not to the extent that we have
it currently.
And so what's the masjid doing?
I mean, at the least charitable interpretation, I've
seen some people even say that the mosque
is like a tax shelter for the rich
Muslims.
May Allah prevent that from being so.
That's some harsh criticism.
I'm not sure that I completely agree to
that, but hopefully that's not the case.
So what we need is we need more,
we need more input from people across the
spectrum.
We need these things to not be under
the control of the hands of the few,
or if they're going to be in the
control of the hands of a few, then
the criteria of who those few should be,
should be their religious knowledge and it shouldn't
be their income or their tax bracket, which
is to be frank, that's what it is
right now.
So it is what it is.
I mean, I had Uzbeki colleague and classmate
in Medina who had a great, I thought
it was a great idea.
He said, what if all the donations to
the masjid were blind, double blind?
You drop it in a box and nobody
knows, you don't know, and nobody knows.
Imagine what that would change.
First of all, it would really see who's
sincere when it comes to making a donation
to the mosque.
Nobody putting their name on anything.
But it would also hopefully, like this, if
you really want to do it for the
community, then you should do it even if
you're not going to get recognized, not expecting
anything in return.
This isn't a corporation where you're buying shares
and you have a 50% share in
the business and now you get control or
voting.
No, that's not how, this is not, this
is the mosque, this is Allah, al-masajid
lillah, like Allah says in the Quran, the
mosques are for Allah.
And so perhaps that's one technique or one
sort of structure that could achieve that, where
you have a thick, thick membrane, where the
people who are the most qualified managerially to
operate the mosque are not beholden to the
people who, Allah bless them, with the ability
to finance the mosque.
There maybe needs to be a thick separation
between those two things.
And there's lots of other things that need
to happen.
In general, sort of the platforming and the
higher, I don't, right now the mosque is
sort of set up as a non-profit,
where there's a board and there's an employee
and the imam is an employee, and how
are you going to have people with zero
religious knowledge evaluating somebody whose job is to
be a religious leader?
I don't see how that works.
Not to say that there's nothing that they
can't evaluate on, obviously there's certain, if we
had ethical standards and things of that nature,
we could say, okay, you're in compliance or
you're not in compliance on this, you know,
but it's just, it's the wrong type of
corporatization of the mosque, in my opinion, where
you're getting down to work hours and tasks
completed, and you're kind of losing the forest
through the trees where you're not seeing community
transformation.
And I've known, people have told me, and
boy, if you knew the stories that the
imams share among themselves, there was an imam
in Toronto that was with the mayor of
Toronto during a prayer time, and he wasn't
at the mosque to lead dhuhr or something
like that, and they fired him on the
spot.
So that just goes to show you the
mentality, where we have people with no sense
of a vision for the future, and a
future of Islam in these lands, that have
a certain expectation of what a community leader
should do or look like, and they are
able to control, hire, evaluate, fire, undermine religious
leaders.
And that's not a formula that's worked very
well.
Yaqeen Institute has released research, has done research.
Over half of the mosques in the United
States don't have a full-time imam.
The average tenure for an imam is less
than two years.
That's not by accident.
That's not just a coincidence.
We're not doing it right.
So may Allah guide us.
I mean, the mosque, it's too important to
turn our back on.
I don't believe that the third space is
a long-term solution.
I think it's just a temporary sort of
holding cell until we figure it out.
We've sunk so much money and resources and
time into these institutions.
We really have to do better.
And we have the talent.
We have the talent in the community.
People such as in Mohamed Hishanawi's community, the
Sheikh's community, are people who are EDs, people
who understand how these things work, people who
come into a community and say, you guys
are on this point in your journey of
non-profit life cycles or life stages or
where you're going, and this is what that
stage calls for, and this is the challenges
of this.
This is all a discipline.
You can get your degree in non-profit
management.
It's very rare to find someone who's qualified
to run a non-profit, running a non
-profit in the Muslim community.
So even that, maybe we're not ready to
turn over the keys to a strong religious
leader.
Maybe, okay, but let's get somebody whose, this
is their actual field of expertise.
They're not a doctor coming in.
They're not a lawyer coming in.
They're not an engineer coming in.
No, their expertise is in non-profit management.
That's the person who should be running the,
managing the community.
Not running the non-profit, right?
And then the religious leader has to be
empowered to be a community leader, and that's
not to say that they do everything right
or that there aren't people out there that
are no good or that are taking advantage.
We need to have the proper standards in
place to hold those people accountable as well,
but you also have to look at where
the community's at.
If the community's at one extreme, we need
to pull them back to the center from
that direction.
If the community's at another extreme, we got
to pull them back to the center from
that other direction.
And right now, there's tons of talented young
religious leaders, imams, that are chased out of
the mosque, that they're not empowered.
They're not allowed to make the transformations that
they know need to be made, and then
they go get another job somewhere else, not
in religious leadership, in IT.
They open up a business.
They do something else.
So we're our own enemy.
We're losing talent.
We're hemorrhaging this talent.
We need to fix this up.
We need to fix it up very, very
soon.