America is Running Out of Muslim Clerics. That's Dangerous.
How Trump’s travel ban worsened a shortage of qualified preachers—and why that’s dangerous.
By SALLY H. JACOBS November 26, 2017
Abu Marwan’s job has gotten a lot harder since Donald Trump took office. The president of the Masjid Al-Rahma outside San Diego, Marwan has relied on volunteers to serve as imam of the rapidly growing mosque ever since it opened in a strip mall several years ago. But these days, when he turns to those same volunteers, they always have something else to do. Marwan says it’s because they’re afraid of violence against Muslims, which has been on the rise since the 2016 election. As he puts it, “They always say they’re busy, busy. The truth is they just don’t want to do it right now.”
Bringing in an imam from overseas has been just as difficult. Marwan invited one from Egypt to come for the holy month of Ramadan this past June, but the religious leader was unable to get a visa. And so, these days, instead of a regular imam at Masjid Al-Rahma, there is a changing cast of volunteers, students and borrowed imams—and sometimes no one at all—to read prayers to the 300 strong congregation. “Every Friday it is a nightmare to fill in the gap,” says Marwan. “Sometimes I have to call hundreds of people and still I can not find someone. It’s very stressful.”
It’s also potentially dangerous, Marwan says. He worries that some mosque members, with no imam to guide them, could soon turn elsewhere for direction, with possibly radical consequences. Imams serve as prayer leaders at their mosques, but they also act as religious guides and community leaders. Young people, Marwan says, “have no good place to go without an imam. They go to the internet or Google and they can end up somewhere very bad. A good imam is the best answer to any evil thing.”
A shortage of imams is not a new challenge for America’s mushrooming Muslim population: More than half of the country’s estimated 2,500 mosques lack a full time imam. But the people trying to fill those slots say that Trump’s efforts to impose an immigration ban on Muslim-majority nations together with rising incidents of Islamophobia have worsened the deficit. It’s the kind of problem that members of the Muslim community as well as terrorism experts warn could contribute to a rise in extremism. “A strong leader who provides a sense of structure and what is right and wrong offers certainty,” says Sarah Lyons-Padilla, a researcher at Stanford University who studies terrorists’ motivations. “So when you remove leaders, like an imam, then you’re basically introducing more uncertainty into an already troubled domain.”
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/26/america-running-out-imams-215867
