HOW ONE IMAM CHANGED A TEENAGER'S LIFE
- SoundVision.com

Shabir Ally was 14 when an Imam helped him make a life-changing decision.

“I came from a family that didn’t put Islam on the top of the ladder,” he explains of his background.

It was an Imam who helped Ally put Islam at the top. He was going around Ally’s village of Annendale in Guyana, encouraging Muslims to come to the Masjid. When the Imam got to Ally’s house he catered his invitation to his father and older brother.

But Ally says it was he who really picked up the message.

Following that visit, Ally began going to the Masjid regularly to pray, attend classes, and some of the brothers there lent him books to read about Islam.

“The more I read the more I saw the beauty of Islam and I realized [it] requires a life commitment, not a peripheral one,” he tells Sound Vision in an interview. “For the first time I came to realize Islam was more than a traditional practice.”

Today Ally is the president of the Islamic Information and Dawa Centre International in Toronto, Canada, which promotes this message he decided to embrace fully as a teenager.

That’s the power of one Imam to bring a Muslim youth closer to Islam.

While the role of parents and the family is unmistakably the first in helping Muslim youth keep their Islam and practice it throughout their lives, Imams and community leaders play a role as well. Their actions and relationship with the youth in their communities can generate love, pride and a commitment to not just know and emotionally attach themselves to Islam, but to really live it.

Imams and Muslim youth - the gap

The gap between the Muslim youth in the West and many Imams is something often complained about by both.

Young Muslims who have grown up here complain Imams follow a dictatorial style of leadership, talking down to them because they are younger, and expecting a “hear and obey” reverence with no respect for them in return. Or they just never acknowledge the special needs of the youth who have grown up here.

Imams on the other hand complain youth in the West are immoral, disrespectful, and do not follow proper Adab [etiquette] in dress and behavior.

The complaints on both sides are often valid. However, as leaders, the Imams seem to forget the very important role they can play in helping Muslim youth in the West maintain their Islamic practice in a context where all religion is virtually shunned, and many Muslims are being swept away by forces of materialism, family breakdown and Christian missionary activity, to name just a few problems.

Farrakhan is bold and straight: can our Imams be like that?

“Sometimes I look at Louis Farrakhan and how loud he is and the strong positions he takes and I wonder why Muslim leaders don’t do that,” says Kamran Memon, referring to the leader of the Nation of Islam, an African-American nationalist and spiritual movement in the United States. “Louis Farrakhan generates a lot of pride among his followers because he is perceived as being strong.”

Memon grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and was involved as a counselor at Muslim Youth of North America (MYNA) conferences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is currently an attorney specializing in discrimination cases in Chicago.

“Whenever there’s a major issue on the radar screen of public life, young Muslims hear many voices, they hear many people sharing their perspectives on each of these issues.....but one voice that’s hardly ever there is the Muslim voice,” he tells Sound Vision.

Muslim leaders’ silence in the public arena on issues of local concern such as racism and homelessness, means more than just the misperception that Muslims have no voice on these issues.

It also means many Muslim youth, in particular, end up seeing Islam as irrelevant to the issues of the day and by extension, themselves as Muslims living in the West.

“Because young Muslims have the impression that their religion does not have anything to say about issues like poverty and violence and racism, it’s easy for them to put Islam in a box and just put it away, because it’s not like they’ve lost anything by doing that.”

“These young people have to see the value of Islam with their eyes,” Memon notes.

Imported and local Imams

Adding to the problem is what some have described as the incessant “importing of Imams” from abroad, who may have the Islamic knowledge, but little to no experience of the needs and realities of Muslims in the West.

”They’re like first generation Imams, what we need is second generation Imams,” says Sheema Khan, a former MYNA Advisor for eastern Canada.

Seeking an Imam familiar with the local culture, Khan says, is something grounded in Islamic teachings.

“When you look at the Qur'an, and you look at the Prophets, they were already part of the society,” she notes. They were familiar with the culture and customs of the people, and the people were familiar with them.

Khan says the people who are really able to talk to the youth are people like Imam Siraj Wahhaj of Brooklyn, New York, an African-American convert who grew up in the U.S. He is a favorite speaker amongst Muslim youth in North America, and at MYNA and Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) conferences, for example.

Khan says it is really the “convert Imams” who have gone back to authentic centers of learning in the Islamic world “who are going to be effective”.

However, she does not blame Imams who have come from abroad to their communities for the fact that most of them cannot solve problems relating to youth who have grown up here. “I think that is unrealistic,” she says.

For Shabir Ally, the action of an Imam led to a turning point in his life as a Muslim youth, and in the long-run as someone devoted to Islam. This was in a non-Muslim country. Perhaps Imams in the West can also help change the life course of so many Muslim youth who are either ignorant, searching or struggling with Islam.

(courtesy of SoundVision.com)

 

Rap Brown was among those who were pursued, harassed, spied on, arrested, and targeted by covert operations. One FBI memo even called for writing unsigned letters to create distrust between Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown.

In 1969, Brown wrote an autobiography entitled Die, Nigger, Die!, in which he presented an in-depth analysis of the problems facing blacks in the time of segregation. As Maryland was preparing to try him for the Cambridge riot, Brown went into hiding in 1970. He reappeared later in 1971 at the scene of a bar hold-up and shootout with police in New York. Police officers shot Brown and arrested him, charging him with armed robbery and attempted murder.

 

Brown Enters Islam

A defining moment in the life of Rap Brown would occur while he was in jail and awaiting trial in New York. Having been exposed to it earlier in his work with the BPP, Brown embraced Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. Al-Amin emerged from prison a dramatically changed man. After his parole in 1976, he performed the Hajj (pilgrimage to Makkah). Upon his return, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, a particularly crime-infested and poverty-stricken part of the city, where he established a masjid (Muslim place of worship) and became its imam (leader). He opened a grocery store, and began doing community work.

From that point on, Imam Jamil encouraged others to reform their lives in the methodology prescribed in the Qur’an and expounded by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). The Muslim community under his leadership led a rejuvenation of the area. The success of his efforts have been recognized by both Muslims and non-Muslims. An area that was once drowning in crime, a place where hypodermic needles littered the parks, became a safer place to live, where parents didn’t need to worry about their children being exposed to drugs and prostitution. The mayor of Whitehall, Alabama, himself a veteran of the civil rights movement, invited Imam Jamil and his community to help with social works. The Imam’s efforts were recognized with the mayor’s appointing him to the auxiliary police force.

The Imam’s leadership has been accredited nationally amongst Muslims. His organization, Jamat Community of Imam Jamil Al-Amin is a coalition of nearly thirty masajid in the United States. He was also appointed to the Islamic Shura Council of North America. Imam Jamil traveled to different universities and conferences, teaching the next generation of Muslims Islamic values. Despite his transformation, Imam Jamil’s past made him a target for both the FBI and local law enforcement.

 

Hounding by the FBI & Friends

For at least five years during the 1990s, the FBI, ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) and Atlanta police carried out an intensive investigation of Imam Jamil and anyone associated with him. As part of their operations, the FBI kept paid informants within Imam Jamil’s Community Mosque.

In 1995, in their first attempt to frame Imam Jamil, the Atlanta police pressured a man who had been shot by an unknown assailant to point out Imam Jamil as the culprit. The man later recanted his accusation, saying the police had pressured him into making the false identification. The man later converted to Islam at the masjid of Imam Jamil. Strangely enough, the investigation for the shooting involved the FBI and ATF in what should have been treated as a routine case of aggravated assault. Although federal agencies have spent years trying to connect him to unsolved crimes and murders in the area, they have not been able to produce a single charge against him. Imam Jamil remains the changed man he became upon entering Islam despite the efforts of different organizations, agencies, and news media to connect him to a violent past. It was during this transformed period of his life that he wrote his new book, Revolution by the Book. In contrast to his earlier Die, Nigger, Die!, Revolution by the Book provides a completely Islamic analysis of the social problems which plague America and minorities in particular. Wasting no time on rhetoric, Imam Jamil exhorts his readers to follow through with “the program,” meaning by this, of course, the divinely revealed program of Islam. Two examples from his book give us a glimpse into the man he has become.

“It is criminal that in the 1990s we still approach struggle...sloganeering... saying ‘by any means necessary,’ as if that’s a program. Or ‘we shall overcome,’ as if that’s a program. Slogans are not programs. We must define the means which will bring about change. This can be found in what Allah has brought for us in the Qur’an and in the example of the Prophet [pbuh]... Successful struggle requires a Divine program. Allah has provided that program.”

“For more than ten years the Prophet focused his community on the all-encompassing power of the Lord of the Worlds. There was no warfare, no military preparations, no economic development programs, no political activism. First the total submission and reliance on the Creator had to be established firmly in the hearts of the believers. Once that was instituted all else followed instinctively, naturally, not in contrived, artificially-induced political programs... To be successful in struggle requires remembrance of the Creator and the doing of good deeds.”

(courtesy of Al-Talib Magazine)