Contributions of our Ulama in SL

(Dr Rifai, Naleemi - UK)

                   Recent times there have been some reports and remarks about Sri Lankan Muslim clerics particularly about their socio-political and religious contributions and the role they play in current affairs of Muslim community in Sri Lanka. I happened to read some internet forum some unwanted remarks about the services that our ulama provide in our mosques. It has been a customary habit of some people to point the finger at our ulama for all wrong doings in our mosques. I know well that our imams and ulamas are working in our mosques under immense soci0-eoconmoc pressures and indeed, they are rendering wonderful services in Sri Lanka and in return what they get is not an excellent reward and rather unnecessary blaming from our community and this is not a good way of thanking our imams and Ulama who dedicate their life for the sake of our community.

                    Before we blame our imams in our mosques let us examine how they are treated in our mosques. Most of our imams are less paid for their jobs they do in our mosques and sometimes our imams do 24 hours jobs in our mosques. They have to lead five time prayers, they have to prepare for Friday sermons, they have to leach more than 100 children every evenings, they have to attend wedding ceremonies, they have to perform funeral rites, they have to attend other communal events and yet what they get in return is a small wage that is barely enough to meet life expenses today. Some of them do not have regularly leave to attend to their families and some of the barely get three days holidays per months.

              They are indeed working with dedication and sacrifices not to please any one rather to please Almighty Allah. Most of them are working under immense economic and social pressure not expecting any reward from our community rather they are working for the sake of Allah. Most of them want to spend sometime sharing their knowledge with our community. They dedicated seven years of their life in learning Islam and in return they want to share this knowledge with Muslim community.

 I have had opportunities to listen to some of imams/ulama who work in our mosques. Some of them are frustrated the way they are treated in our mosques. Yet, we expect from them lots more. We expect from them that they should deliver first class Friday sermons and we expect from them to speak on current affairs that concern our community and we expect from them to behave in certain ways. And yet most of our mosques do not provide the salaries and facilities they deserve.

Let us now we examine the root cause of this problem. Let us think where do we get our imams and ulama from today? Most of them are products/ graduates of our old fashioned Madarasas. Unless we have some graduates from modern Islamic institutes in SL and Abroad, all our imams and Ulama are local products and locally produced imams.  We all know the quality of teaching in our Madarasas. Most of our madarasas are outdated in its teaching methods and in its syllabi.  Look at the way our community send our children into our Madarasas.  Look at the selection of process into our madarasas.

   We all know that less qualified children are sent into madarasas education in our communities: our children with 8As are sent into biosciences/ maths/ or management studies while less bright ones are sent into Madarasas. If this is the case, how could we expect to have high calibre imams in our mosques? Reformation should come from foundation, from our selection process into Islamic institutions which train imams. The more clever pupils go to Islamic fields the more qualified imams we could have in SL. The mentality of our community in this regards need to be changed. Our community should send bright ones into Islamic fields so that we could have good Imams. Today, to speak for Islam and in the name of Islam we need highly talented people both in Islamic sciences and modern sciences. Otherwise, our Imams would not be able to relate modern contemporary issues in this modern world. Unfortunately, our Madarasas do not have comprehensive syllabi to teach our children both religious and modern subjects at once.

 Of course, the quality of sermons in our mosques should be improved.  We should train imams for this. There is no uniform method of delivering sermons in SL: each imam select topics of sermons at their convenience as they like. They do not pay due attention to the subject matters and current burning issues. Topics should be relevant and it should be according to contextual needs of our times and country. There must be one centre to recruit / train/ monitor imams: even to guide imams in our country: there is no system in place:  most of our imams do not get training in our Madarasas to deliver speech and sermons.

Most of our imams come from poor family backgrounds: They are not well paid, they do not have job security or guarantee/ they do not have pension, they do not have EPF. Most of them do this unwillingly until they get another job. Recently I happened to speak to one imam, he listed me a numbers of problems imams face in our mosques and he said most imams want to get away from this post. Of course the post of imam is a rewarding post and yet, our community does not see it from this perspective.

Qualified people with degree would not work in this position unless there is some job guarantees/
With all these problems we should examine the problems of imams compressively rather than seeing it from one perspective. There is no point in blaming them until we have alternative mechanism to reform this system? Is it is easy to talk about but we do little action to help imams/ improve their conditions. If any one concerns about the conditions of our imams, he or she should propose some viable mechanism to improve their conditions. In some Muslim countries Imams are paid by the governments here in Sri Lanka we do not have such a system.