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WASHINGTON (Islam Online) - The American Muslim Council (AMC) is preparing to stage a national conference for Muslim imams to be held in Crystal City, Virginia, from September 29th to October 2nd, in order to create a forum to help empower Muslims to promote their ideas and interests in the public sector.
Imams and mosque administrators from around the United States are being invited to attend the conference for an intensive workshop on political activism. The conference hopes to impart upon conference attendees the manner in which to organize strong and viable Muslim political involvement. The organization states that there are approximately seven to eight million American Muslims in the United States that could possibly possess significant influence on the outcome of policies and issues important to their communities. The goal of the conference is to provide an orientation into American politics and imbibe an Islamic perspective on how to be active within the political system. Exercising the right to vote is one of the primary goals the conference wishes to impart to the participants. "The Muslim community should be pro-active and be able to mobilize. It's an election year, thus it's important that we educate the Muslim community to actively participate in the electoral process," said Neveen Salem, AMC's communications director. Abdurahman Alamoudi, Secretary for AMC, in giving reasons why such a conference is needed said, "People who control the pulpit, our imams, are very important into mobilizing the community. "Having the understanding of the people who are supposed to give the guidelines, the moral leadership of the community, these are the people that we have to bring to our side." "By having the imams educated on this issue, this important issue, we think through them we can get through to the community," Alamoudi commented, adding, "Get to the community to make the right decisions on how political activities affect us as a community." Alamoudi stated that in AMC's initial beginnings, they had not consulted with imams concerning the issue of political participation by Muslims. They recognized this shortcoming and in an effort to rectify the matter, designed the Imam conference to make up for the unintended oversight. "Muslims cannot continue like this," Alamoudi stated, addressing current Muslim lack of political involvement. The conference offers a comprehensive schedule and will feature sessions with accomplished Muslim scholars including Dr. Jamal Badawi, Dr. Sherman Jackson, Dr. Muzammil Siddiqui, Dr. Taha Alalwani, Dr. Cherif Basouni, and Imam Siraj Wahaj to mention a few. |
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