Tom Facchine – What Skills Do I Need To Be An
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the importance of learning to become an spontaneous leader and empowering others. Leading is a combination of religious knowledge and leadership, and it is crucial to not just be a leader but also invest in others. Leading is also crucial to being a great leader and being optimistic.
AI: Summary ©
And leading is not just calling the shots
and having a big chair. Leading has to
do with empowering other people.
Somebody asked, what do I have to do
to become an imam?
And that that made me laugh. It's a
funny question. But, you know, if you want
to do that to yourself, then there's 2
aspects. There's one aspect that's well known and
there's one that nobody talks about or only
a few talk about.
So the aspect of it or the dimension
of it that's well known is the religious
knowledge. You know, you need to study preferably
abroad.
Right? You need to study in the Arabic
language. You need to be able to, you
know, have enough proficiency in the Arabic language
to interact with the the math and the
Quran in a direct way without anybody spoon
feeding you their interpretation.
Right? That's what it takes. You know?
So everybody knows that. Right? You know, they
send their kids, and they know that there's
programs that even are springing up here on
this side of the world.
But the funny thing is for graduates of
those institutions, then they get inside of a
community and they find themselves completely unprepared for
being an EMAM
because,
being an EMAM in North America
is
a really interesting and complicated thing.
There's a lot of people who have different
expectations upon you for what you're going to
be able to do. If you go to
a place like Turkiye or, you know, in
the Middle East,
the imam is not a marriage counselor.
The imam is not a youth director. The
imam is not a,
you know, somebody that you would go to
if you're having a crisis in your life.
You know, you'll go to family. You go
to somebody else. But North America, that all
comes under usually the imam's plate as well.
So
if you graduate from one of these programs,
Medina, Morocco, Turkey, and you went to Turkey
or anywhere else, you come back
and then you find that, okay, you might
know the Quran and Sunnah, you might know
the Urimat and the religious sciences, but
now you're an educator because you teach people
and yet you have no training in education.
And
you are a counselor, because people have problems
and you have no training in counseling.
And you are usually in smaller communities also
an administrator. You have to come up with
maybe flyers or program details and communicate, and
you're sending WhatsApp messages and emails and keeping
rosters and stuff like that, and you have
no training in that either.
So a lot of what you end up
doing
is stuff that you have absolutely no training
for.
And that's a problem, honestly, structurally with how
we we run Masajid in North America.
The other thing, and this is probably even
more important than that, is that no one
teaches you how to be a leader.
That leadership is something that I am just
coming around to realizing
Looking back on my two and a half
years,
here,
that I had no idea how to be
a leader.
Leadership is something that
there are a lot of books out there.
There's a lot of workshops. You know, they're
obviously, the corporate world is very, very interested
in how to lead people. And some of
the stuff is
not so good and not beneficial and some
of the stuff actually is really beneficial.
So if you wanna be an imam,
maybe you can survive without being the best
educator, the best administrator, the best counselor, but
you need to try to learn how to
be a leader.
And that's not easy. You need to learn
how to deal with people of all types.
You need to be able to be ready
for people to curse in your face and
talk about you behind your back. Right? You
need to be able to communicate. You have
a vision, be a big thinker,
be optimistic,
communicate your vision to other people, convince other
people,
have people buy into you and trust you,
and then lead. You know? And leading is
not just calling the shots and having a
big chair. Leading has to do with empowering
other people, has to do with investing in
other people. It takes a lot of time.
It takes a lot out of you.
And these are not things that I do
well. I
don't put that out there. But I I've
started to learn that
it's there are areas in which I have
to improve upon. And if you're an up
and coming imam, then you can be a
better one than me
by starting now.