http://ihsan-net.blogspot.com/2005/05/pay-peanuts-get-imams.html#label
The young man lived a comfortable life with his wife
and children in Islamabad. He taught Islamic sciences at the International
Islamic University. The university provided him with a house, a car with driver
and a comfortable salary.
Then one day, an expatriate Pakistani comes to visit him from Sydney, Australia.
The young academic is told he can earn at least 10 times as much by moving to
Australia and working as imam for a growing Urdu-speaking Muslim community in
the outer suburbs of Sydney.
The young man is also offered free accommodation near the mosque. He is offered
a salary expressed in Pakistani rupees. He is shown the contract and invited to
sign. The young man signs. Within weeks, a plane ticket arrives. The man resigns
from his comfortable job to take up what he thinks is an even more comfortable
job in a more prosperous country.
What the young man did not factor in was the following:
*The salary was expressed in Pakistani rupees. When converted into Australian
dollars, it was much less. It was hardly enough to buy groceries.
*The incoming imam would be employed by the Islamic Society, whose executive members often were do-it-yourself scholars who believed everything they read in Fatawah Rahimiya (a book of answers to questions made to Mufti Abdur Rahim Lajpuri, a prominent Deobandi scholar) or for whom Behishti Zewar (a popular book of hanafi law written specifically for Indian Muslim women) was more important than the Qur’an.
*The Islamic Society was the subject of an attempted takeover by a number of factions, and the imam was expected to favour one faction above others.
*The house was a run-down old shack with hardly enough
room to swing a cat, let alone roll a turban around your head.
Over the next few months, the imam was expected to lead the prayers, teach kids
Qur’an, settle domestic disputes, give fatwas on moonsighting, sight
the moon, unsight everyone else’s moon and be a jack-of-all-deeni-trades.
He worked 36 hours a day, and was paid less than $20,000 a year.
The imam made a genuine attempt to learn English. Instead of appreciating his
efforts, the Punjabi doctors on the executive were upset that he spoke better
English in his sermons than they spoke in their surgeries. He also spoke fluent
Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic. And despite having ancestry from Thana Bhawan
(a village in Saharanpur, India that has produced some of the Islamic
world’s finest legal minds), the imam knew the limitations of texts executive
members would quote to him when passing judgment on an aspect of his sermon they
disagreed with.
After 10 years or so, there was a change in the executive. The imam was
dismissed without 48 hours notice. He was accused of a range of crimes. He
allegedly missed leading some prayer services as he had domestic duties to
attend to. He also dared to enrol in some computing courses, and even committed
the ultimate sin of arranging alternate sources of income to supplement the halal
rations being thrown his way by the Islamic Society.
The imam was distraught when he came to see me. After telling me his story, I
remember telling him that he would look back in 10 years time and see his
dismissal as the best career change of his life.
2 years ago, I saw him again. By this time he was running a number of businesses
and teaching at a Qur’anic school. He confirmed my prediction made a decade
before was correct.
We keep complaining about how useless our imams are, how little they know and
how much they stuff up when making public statements. Yet we expect so much from
them. An imam serving a modern Muslim community in a western country is not just
someone who leads the prayers and performs weddings and funerals. An imam is
expected to be a teacher, marriage counsellor, psychologist, mufti and
social worker. Typically, imams are more educated and articulate than the
executive members that supervise their performance.
In Australia, it is common for imams to be employed on short-term contracts.
Imams commonly are dismissed with little or no notice and for the flimsiest
reasons. Job security and work-life balance are usually absent from an imam’s
contract.
Practitioners of physical and mental health are well-paid and respected
professionals. Practitioners of spiritual health are paid peanuts, yet their
paymasters often behave more like monkeys than the employed maulana.
Practitioners of Australian law (like me, alhumdulillah!) are usually
well-paid and also well-respected. Yet imams, the practitioners of Islamic law,
are frequently faced with blank-cheque fatwas from executive members
which they are expected to endorse and justify.
I know of qualified Islamic scholars in Sydney and Melbourne who manage kebab
shops. I once asked one of them why he preferred making kebabs to teaching and
leading prayers. He remarked: “May Allah save us all from the curse of being
an imam at a mosque!”.
(I also asked him why there were no prices listed on his menu. He said:
“Brother, here we do ijtihad for our customers”.)
It’s said that you get what you pay for. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
But in the average Sydney mosque, executive committee monkeys are paying peanuts
to imams and expecting them to perform tricks like circus animals. Little wonder
our communities operate like a circus.