Tom Facchine – What Skills Do I Need To Be An

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.