Like Uber for mosques, new website connects Muslims to Islamic services
The majority of Muslims in the West are practicing their faith without weekly mosque attendance, and that means figuring out how to maintain important traditions while innovating newer forms of Islamic communities.
In that landscape a new website, Imam Connect, has launched to connect Muslims in the U.S. and U.K. to Islamic services like faith-based counseling and therapy, match making, nikah ceremonies to sign the marriage contract, funeral prayers, support for domestic violence victims, lessons from Muslim instructors in art, fitness or reading the Quran and more. Their audience is especially geared toward the so-called “unmosqued,” many younger than 40, or those who have moved to areas where local mosques in their tradition may be few, to help them find religious services and compare prices and benefits. Some services may be offered for donations only.
“Growing up, when we moved my parents would always invite an imam to bless the home, and I’ve moved a few times as an adult and I haven’t done that, just because I don’t know who to approach to do it,” said one of Imam Connect’s founders Muddassar Ahmed, a London-based entrepreneur and communications consultant. He is also the founding president of The Concordia Forum, a non-profit annual retreat for senior Western Muslim leaders, where he met like-minded entrepreneurs to build Imam Connect. It’s “kind of like the ‘Uber for Imams’,” Ahmed said.
During the coronavirus pandemic, many Muslims don’t have the ability to access religious services like normal. The need for an online platform has only become greater, Ahmed said.
“We’ll always need traditional institutions,” said Ahmed. “But first- and second-generation Muslims are often more interested in TikTok than going to the mosque. That’s because the mosque isn’t where their community resides. Our research shows that despite not engaging with the mosque, they still want faith-based support.”
While many Christians see church attendance as central to their faith and a measure of religiosity, citing Biblical passages to gather together, many Muslims do not see the mosque as central to their religious practices.
“You don’t need to go to the mosque necessarily to be a practicing Muslim,” said Rafia Khader, a practicing Muslim in Indianapolis and PhD student in American Studies at Indiana University with a focus on Islam. “Muslims are obligated to pray five times a day. But that can be done anywhere. With the exception of the Friday (jumu’ah) prayer — and even that is not required of all Muslims — the prayers are not required to be performed in a mosque.”
Khader studies the recent growth of “third spaces,” Islamic communities outside the home and mosque. She has found that third spaces are usually created because of perceived issues with the mosque, like programs not being relevant for young Muslims or women’s prayer spaces being secluded, hard to access, and not properly maintained.
“Many – though not all – of the mosques in the U.S. were founded by immigrants who came to America in the 1960s and 70s,” she said. “The likelihood of a mosque founder or imam being under 40 is very low… A lot of these young Muslims are reacting to the older generation and the culture that pervades the mosque that doesn’t really speak to their experience as a Muslim growing up in America.”
Since the mosque isn’t the necessarily the only place to provide Islamic services, the idea is not for Imam Connect to compete with local mosques, but to enhance the mosques by giving them a platform to advertise their services online and engage more followers, especially those they haven’t connected with before.
“The traditional mosque institution has been the vehicle of religious communities around the world,” Ahmed said. “A lot of these places have had tech disruptions— the cab industry, hotel industry… So has the mosque.”
The site could also help pad the incomes of imams, who often are paid at or below minimum wage for their religious work. American Muslims are the most likely faith community in the U.S. to report a low income, with one third living at or below the poverty line of a combined household income of $30,000 a year or less.
“Although imams provide critical services, they rarely have the opportunity to reach beyond their immediate communities,” said Imam Dr. Tarek Elgawhary, an Islamic scholar and president of the Coexist Foundation. “At the same time there are millions of displaced Muslim minorities who don’t have access to these critical services. It’s crazy that we haven’t thought of this before.”
Mosques provide a variety of services on a donation basis or for free if the family or individual cannot afford to donate. Online, they would operate the same way, but one additional feature of Imam Connect is to vet imams.
“There’s no way to review religious service providers. You can’t give a mosque five stars on Yelp, you know?” Ahmed said.
Imam Connect verifies the people signing up to offer services are who they say they are, and a person can only sign up through personal referrals. Users can see who has passed a background check and who hasn’t uploaded a background check yet. Except for Austria, no country in the West vets or approves Muslim leaders the way that Muslim-majority governments often do. Islamic associations and mosques individually approve imams, but many Muslims are left to choose based on their proximity to a mosque and their family’s national and ethnic backgrounds.
Ahmed hopes his platform will increase the accessibility of religious services. He says he sees Imam Connect as a social enterprise—it needs to make money to sustain itself, but its founders aren’t expecting or aiming for profits.
“It’s a very simple idea,” he said. He can’t believe that no one else has done it yet.
Meagan Clark is the managing editor of Religion Unplugged. Follow her on Twitter @MeaganKay.