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"The community accepts that we have to open our doors and talk to the other communities and see that we are proactive in all this," Ali said. |
CANBERRA — Australian Muslims have agreed to launch a national board to supervise mosques and train imams and improve political leadership in the Muslim minority.
"There are lots of imams claiming to be imams. We don't know their credentials and we can't monitor what they are doing in their mosques," Ameer Ali, Chairman of the Federation of Islamic Councils, told Australia radio on Monday, September 18.
"If you have an organized structure at a national level, then the imams themselves will be able to monitor these people, and they will know who is who and where they are operating," he stressed.
"So they will be responsible to monitor what happens in any mosque."
Details of the proposed body are yet to be worked out, according to the daily The Age.
As part of the drive, state boards are expected to be set up to assist the new body, which will either be made up of imams or a mixture of Muslim scholars and community leaders.
More than 100 Muslim leaders and imams came together in a two-day meeting in Sydney on Saturday, September 16.
During the meeting, participants studied overseas models, including the North America Islamic Council, to follow in establishing the new board.
"The imams' conference certainly gave a ringing endorsement in principle that there should be a national board of imams and that there should be a steering committee to look at the process on how that is developed which is inclusive," said Australian Multicultural Foundation chairman Hass Dellal.
Muslims, who have been in Australia for more than 200 years, make up 1.5 percent of the 20 million population.
Open Days
Australian Muslims have also agreed to hold open days at mosques to promote a better understanding of Islam and clear misconceptions associating the Muslim faith with violence.
"The community accepts that we have to open our doors and talk to the other communities and see that we are proactive in all this," Ali said.
Muslims have also agreed to increase the use of English in sermons and improve political leadership in their minority.
"The imams recognize the importance of engaging Muslim youth and women in their institutions and addressing the ongoing needs of their respective communities."
The Muslim drive was immediately extolled by Prime Minister John Howard.
He said that the changes would make the minority more open and help curb what he described as the small section of Muslims preaching violence.
"We continue to worry that there is a section of the Islamic community, a very small section, that is not serving the interests of anybody with some of the things that they've had to say," Howard told Australian radio.
Howard has been under fire from Australian Muslim leaders for continuing to single out the Muslim minority for criticism, warning such repetitive anti-Muslim remarks could alienate the minority further and spark racial violence.
Most Australian Muslims blame Howard for fostering an image of the minority as the enemy within through his hard-line policies and unbalanced remarks.
Last year, Howard bluntly said that Muslim immigration to Australia had presented problems not seen in previous waves of migration from Europe and Asia.
In February, Howard, a staunch supporter of US President George Bush's war on terror and Iraq invasion, again angered the minority by saying he was concerned about extremist Muslim immigrants bent on jihad.
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