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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| imam embodies new generation of muslims |
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| se7en |
| 12/15/03 at 03:23:17 |
| as salaamu alaykum, read this article off bro arshad's site.. had me cracking up.. sounds like a very cool imam masha'Allah :) http://www.msnbc.com/local/MYOC/M341115.asp?cp1=1 Imam embodies new generation of Muslims By JIM HINCH --The Orange County Register Orange County, CA., Nov. 24 - The groom was nervous. To his right sat his bride. To the left, the imam of his mosque. He looked down at the marriage license and rubbed his hands on his pants. The imam handed him a pen. "OK, get on your knee," the imam said. The groom glanced around uncertainly, then lumbered off his chair and sank to the ground. "Which one?" he asked. "Ha-ha," replied the imam. "You don't have to do that. I was just kidding. Go ahead and sign." Yassir Fazaga, religious leader of the Orange County Islamic Foundation mosque in Mission Viejo, is one of the youngest imams in America - and it shows, especially during religious ceremonies, when Fazaga can't resist trotting out jokes or nuggets of self-help wisdom to break down a stereotyped view of Muslim leaders as stern, elderly moral policemen. Thirty years old, single and a regular at mosque volleyball games, he is informal and at ease with American culture. Those qualities make him a powerful draw to Southern California's multi-ethnic Muslims, who find themselves coming of age in an America where the third largest religion is Islam, behind Christianity and Judaism. Fazaga returned to Mission Viejo in 1998 from an Islamic religious-studies institute in Virginia. Now, nearly 1,000 faithful cram into Friday prayers in a converted industrial-park building that once housed a school warehouse, tap-dance academy and chiropractor's office. After services, Fazaga wades into the crowd, bear-hugging Iranians in suits, chatting with Latino converts in full hijab and laughing with kids in Audioslave T-shirts. Other afternoons, he sits down to counsel married couples who knew him as a high school student. When he lectures the youth group, he lets kids make fun of his African accent. He tells worshippers to call him by his first name and fills prayer lectures with real-life examples - such as a father deciding between working harder or spending more time with his kids - to make them relevant to middle-class Muslims struggling with middle-class dilemmas. His one regret: Single women do not exactly clamor to date a man with a religious job. He even bounces through Ramadan, the holy month of fasting that ends Tuesday. At a recent interfaith dinner sponsored by a Southern California council of imams, Fazaga traded jokes with a fellow imam over who was more handsome and introduced himself to a Garden Grove hotel ballroom full of religious leaders with the words: "I'm Yassir Fazaga, and I'm still waiting for my coffee." "You're going to see more of this kind of phenomenon, people raised in the U.S. and reflecting American culture while maintaining Islamic values as well," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C. "Generally, imams tend not to be elderly, but mature adults, and not born in the United States. ... I think imams who have an understanding of American society are going to be valued in our community, because we need to communicate to the larger society, and the best way to do that is through people who understand that society." SAME FAITH, DIFFERENT IMAGE Fazaga looks like a typical American bachelor. He wears khakis and open-collared shirts and drives an old Toyota so seldom washed that someone recently scrawled a tic-tac-toe game on the back window. But he was born in Africa, came to the United States at age 14 and became an imam after a long, uneasy search for identity in his adopted homeland. His jokes are like sweetener in medicine. Behind the grinning and bear-hugging is a man described by friends as shy, serious and almost painfully earnest about spreading and justifying his faith. During a prayer lecture on the anniversary of Sept. 11, he recounted other massacres, including Israeli killings of Palestinians and an American-backed coup that toppled Chile's democratically elected government on Sept. 11, 1973. Muslims, he told the faithful, should take from such incidents a renewed commitment to seeing others as Go`'s creation, full of dignity and worthy of charity and respect. "I feel I have to preserve Islam for my generation," Fazaga said shortly before the service, his toddler niece looking around his office from his lap. "People have an image of an imam: tough, rigid, big beard. In my opinion, the best way to make faith attractive is to be an imam who is extremely approachable." Fazaga, the seventh of eight kids, was born to a Muslim family in the African nation of Eritrea, but he doesn't know exactly when. His parents think it was 1973, but there are no records, and many Africans don't bother with birthdays, he said. "I don't ever remember playing outside. You'd hear gunfire at night," he said of the civil war that raged around his childhood home. When he was 6, the family fled, barefoot, to Khartoum, the capital of neighboring Sudan. His father went to work in Saudi Arabian oil fields, sent money home and rarely saw his family. Fazaga lived surrounded by relatives in a neighborhood steeped in Islam - kids stopped playing and went home for dinner at the sound of the evening prayer call. Still, like his friends, he paid more attention to soccer than to his faith. In 1987, his family flew to Orange County to join his sister, who came to America on a college scholarship and became a resident. They moved into a Cypress apartment, where Fazaga turned on the television and marveled at a rerun of "The Bionic Woman." At Cypress High School, and later at University High School in Irvine, where the family moved two years later, Fazaga struggled with English, played on soccer teams and made friends with other ESL students. Neighbors in Cypress hurled racial epithets at the family and vandalized their apartment. "We couldn't understand," Fazaga said. Finally, the family realized they were targets of racial attitudes they hadn't experienced in Africa. NEW FRIENDS OPEN PATH TO RELIGIOUS LEARNING One day, an older sister attending UCI brought home some friends from the Islamic students club. Fazaga was entranced. "Their ability to combine being successful in their worldly goals, and yet being good Muslims - I always thought that to make a success you had to leave religion behind," he said. "People at home (in Africa) who were into their religion were looked down on." Listening to the college students read the Quran in Arabic and earnestly discuss the character of Mohammad, Fazaga said he felt his sense of unease in America slough off, replaced by desire to become learned in his religion. In 1993, he enrolled in the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in Fairfax, Va. When he graduated with a degree in Islamic studies five years later, the Mission Viejo mosque he had attended while in high school was looking for a teacher. Qualified imams are generally in short supply, so Fazaga, who knew many in the congregation, got the job. "I never envisioned myself as an imam," he said - and neither did his congregation at first. Some balked at being taught or counseled by a man they had known as "little Yassir" in high school, a man who still lives with his parents in Huntington Beach. But Fazaga's earnestness and his ability to make faith practical won over worshippers. "He is giving you something updated, like things we are facing right now," said Abdul Ghani, an Irvine shuttle-bus driver, after a recent prayer lecture in which Fazaga told worshippers to temper financial ambition. "That was such a relief to me, to think I should not be worried about not having a Lexus." As a recent imam council dinner wound down, Fazaga, with a sly grin, recalled another wedding when he gave the groom a prank pen that delivered an electric shock. Then he grew serious. He put down a fork full of cheesecake and stared intently. "It's important to put in the human element," he said. "I'm not an angel. I have my faults and shortcomings. I get tempted. At the end of the day, I'm just a person who happens to be an imam." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT IS AN IMAM? Imam means "leader" in Arabic. Anyone who leads - such as a father leading a family in prayer - can be considered an imam. Islam does not have an ordained clergy. However, men who are especially learned in the Quran and Islamic studies are frequently hired by mosques to lead prayers and direct religious activities. These men are called imams. . Imams either train under the tutelage of a more senior imam or attend an Islamic studies institute, such as the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in Fairfax, Va. . In addition to leading prayer services, imams give marital counseling and answer worshippers' religious and moral questions. Some work full time. Others volunteer. They do not manage a mosque's financial or administrative affairs - that is the job of the mosque director. . During the holy month of Ramadan, which began Oct. 26 and ends Tuesday, imams' workload increases. They fast all day, then lead prayers each evening, when Muslims break their fast. . Muslims in America: 7 million. . Mosques in America: 2,000. . Muslims in Orange County: 170,000. . Mosques in Orange County: 11. |
| 12/15/03 at 03:25:04 |
| se7en |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |