Late last year I had another run in with some Hizb ut Tahrir members. They wanted to post event notices on the mosque (ISNS) listserv and I rejected the posts. The HT member was very upset and pulled in one of my fellow mosque board members into the debate to lodge a protest.
It turns out that this HT member was so upset because he was not used to being denied in this way. Afterall, this HT member was an authorized Jummah khateeb (a person who gives the obligatory Friday afternoon congregational prayer sermon and usual then leads the faithful in prayer as well)!
This is simply unacceptable. If we say we (our mosque) do not support violent extremism, then how is it that we allow members of such groups to use our institutions to promote their hateful and violent ideologies?
One thing I plan to do in 2010 is to be more vigilant about what is being said during the Friday khutbahs (sermons). This year I hope to write about the khutbahs I hear. It will be my little effort to bring more accountability to what is being said in mosques and also to highlight and applaud all the positive messages and teaching that is going on.
This last Friday (1/1/10) I attended the Al-Azhar Islamic Foundation in Barrington, Illinois for Salatul Jummah. The khateeb was of Egyptian origin (as are most of the organizers of this mosque). He did a great job.
The khateeb this past Friday focused on the importance of remembering that Islam is a middle path that rejects extremism and that it is the duty of Muslims to look inward into our community and address extremism that we find within it.
He used the metaphor of our children. When our children behave badly we look at their actions and we try to teach them the error of their ways. What we don't do is make excuses for them and point the external factors and blame those external factors for our children's mistakes. Yes, we know that there may be external factors that influenced our children's bad behavior but we know that making excuses for their behavior will only entrench negative behaviors in our children.
So then, why, asked our khateeb, do we immediately point to others, to U.S. policies and so forth when our fellow Muslims commit crimes? He pointed out the Nigerian Muslim who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit, MI on December 25, Christmas Day, and suggested that we are doing ourselves (and particularly the younger generations of American Muslims) a disservice by point the finger at others and skirting the issue of the young Nigerian Muslim's culpability.
The khateeb then went on to discuss the value of ritual worship and its centrality to a Muslim's religious life but noted that ritual worship is a guide and a tool and a resource to help us live our lives and to engage with the world and work and live in the world with others. His point was that faithful life is more than just steadfast ritual worship and that we need to do more good in the world.
It was a packed prayer hall and there were lots of youth present since it was new year's day. It was a good message for the community. I hope others had the benefit of a good khutbah to kick of the new year as well!
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