The Muslim students and alumni at Cornell University have been diligently working on establishing the first Muslim chaplaincy position on their campus. Together they have organized an official association, the Diwan Foundation, aimed at providing programming and services to support the well-being of Muslims on campus. As part of this wonderful and ambitious initiative, they have also recently begun publishing a newsletter addressing issues of relevance to Muslims on campus. It was my honor to have been asked in their latest issue to provide them with a brief introduction to Islamic chaplaincy: Why a Muslim Chaplain?
Generally, the imam is looked to as the leader of his community and the source of guidance for his congregation. In America this is no different and requires the presence of certain traits in the ideal imam. From these traits are things such as the following: having a strong training in and knowledge of the traditional Islamic sciences; understanding the people and culture that he is serving; speaking English fluently; knowing how to deal with people, empowering and motivating them; being aware of the major trends in society and cultivating the ability to address them from the perspective of Islam; having a spirit of humility, self-sacrifice, and servitude; and so on.
imam to spend large quantities of his time. In many of our communities we find that imams are busy in a never-ending flow of counseling sessions that wear them out spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. This has the devastating effect of taking them away from the crucial roles of religious instruction, guidance, and their own personal studies. We face many challenges and imams that do not have the chance to even review things that they learned in their studies, let alone increase their knowledge, will find themselves incapable of addressing these challenges and come up short in providing thought and guidance for the people.
“Ibrahim,” he asked, “can you speak with me?” Ahmad*, 19, was a young Muslim man struggling with peer pressure at his community college to drink and engage in sexual activity. I was not the imam, nor was I a chaplain at this time, but I could see in his eyes that he was desperately seeking some good advice and someone who would listen to him. While Ahmad came from a practicing Muslim home, he did not feel comfortable speaking to them about the peer pressures he faced. He confessed to me that he had been giving in to them and knew that what he was doing was wrong. Though he had wanted to seek help for some time from his local imam, he worried that the most the imam would tell him was that what he was doing is ḥarām. Ahmad also felt the imam, who had been raised in another country, would not understand the pressures of growing up in an American society. He wanted to speak to someone who, he felt, would understand the pressures he faced and not simply offer a legal verdict.
Often times incidents we consider negative are actually due to misunderstandings; maybe through blowing it out of proportion, not placing it within a more broad perspective, or seeing it as falling short of unreasonable standards. Sometimes we don’t know how we should interpret something, and we find ourselves confused or mentally exhausted.