Appearing on other blogs

Here are some other blogs that I have recently appeared on:

An Evening with Imam Tahir

Stations of Mustafa

Gateway to Success

Being an Imam in Silicon Valley

Being an imam, a religious leader in the Muslim community, is a 24-hour-a-day job. With responsibilities ranging from leading your community in five daily prayers to performing wedding ceremonies, an imam has to be prepared for just about anything.

To become an imam requires years of studying “sacred knowledge,” or traditional Islamic sciences. But unlike Western educational systems, all the subjects covered are done with ijazah, or a chain of transmissions passed on from one teacher to another going back to the prophet Muhammad.

“There are no hours to being an imam. Sometimes I start right after fajr, the dawn prayer which, in the summer, is at 5 a.m.,” said Tahir Anwar, the imam of the South Bay Islamic Association (SBIA) in San Jose. “An imam is on call at all times.”

Tahir has been the imam at SBIA for the past two years. Originally from London, he moved to the Bay Area in 1983. His travels led him to devote eight years of his life studying sacred knowledge. Imam Tahir studied such subjects as Arabic; tajweed, the art of reciting the Muslim holy book properly; and hifz, the art of memorizing the entire Quran in its native Arabic, among other sciences. Imam Tahir was able to commit the entire Quran to memory by age 16.

“[It] took me a little over two years full time [to memorize the Quran],” said Imam Tahir. “[It] is not as hard to memorize it as it is to maintain it.”

During the holy month of Ramadan, Imam Tahir leads a nightly congregation of prayer, called tarweeh, in which, by the end of the month, he must recite the entire Quran out loud.

Imam Tahir’s duties include serving the Muslim community as a religious leader as well as reaching out to people of other faiths. He must serve as a representative of the Muslim community and try to shed stereotypes that exist.

“[I have] many opportunities to talk with people of other faiths; most of them are so unaware of what Islam is,” said Imam Tahir. “They are shocked to hear what it truly is. Many of them are very open to the Islamic traditions and respect you for it. I always carry a book called What Everyone should know about Islam and Muslims by Suzanne Hanif, and give this to anyone whenever I get a chance.”

Because of the responsibilities of an imam to serve as a teacher and leader, it can be a very demanding job. But, Imam Tahir still loves his work and says there are no drawbacks to his job. “[Because] Muslims believe this life is a preparation for the life of the hereafter, I believe that while I am doing my job and earning to make a living, I am preparing for the hereafter.”

By Sajid Farooq (2002)

http://www.asianweek.com/2002_06_07/feature_profiles.html