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This week witnessed the departure of Imam Suhaib Webb from the Bay Area. His departure, as reluctantly admitted during a Ta’leef Collective event last evening, attests to the organizational challenges coupled with challenging the “old guard” governors of our masajid (mosques). Imam Suhaib spoke specifically to what he characterized as no-brainer issues like MCA’s male-female wall (which he attested was a surviving relic sourced in some 4th century A.H. controversy) and whether Yoga is haram or not (a suggestion for Yoga at the masjid was likely shot down in the recent past).

Regardless of the politics that underpinned his decision to leave the MCA, Imam Suhaib’s challenge beckons young Muslims (read 18-40) in the Bay Area to think long and hard about their duty to their Creator in building a sustainable community. In this writer’s experience in the past several years in the Bay Area, he has not seen so much as one young professional in the Bay who is squarely dedicated to this cause. Given we can presume “old guard” types who govern and built today’s masajid (mosques) to continue forward with their current inertia, masajid will continue to be marred by the salient issues we all find uncomfortable:

Poor financial planning and constant, unjustified growth (Masjid Y, please help donate for Masjid X, it’s about to sink!)

Spending much for cultural artifacts that have nothing to do with the faith (see Abu Bakr Siddiq Mosque on Mission in Hayward with its sorry attempt at a Timurid-style mosque, or Lowry in Fremont with its out-of-place, bulbous minaret facades)

Religious programming that is not optimized for our main purposes (serving God by serving his Creator by developing knowledge, serving the orphan and poor, and working to rectify injustice)

Lack of discipline in social functions (people speaking, hell-raiser children running in the middle of khutbahs, poor commitments to starting and stopping on time)

and the many other shortcomings that our occasionally disgruntled selves rightly point out.

So what’s the next step? Young folks, who Imam Suhaib mentioned contribute disproportionately less to the masajid, tend to focus on

School until their mid twenties

Marriage and work until their late-twenties – early-thirties

Balancing family, marriage, and often mortgage by their mid-30s*

and leadership in the masjid community will, among competing priorities, likely take a back seat.

So what now?

* the focuses listed are a product of the writer’s best assessment of the common population, not the product of a rigorous, data-driven study