Source: The Washington Post
A Friday prayer service at Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church in December 2015. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)
Johari Abdul-Malik has worked to pull his embattled mosque “out of the fire” too many times, and on Friday he decided he had enough.
Abdul-Malik, an imam and the public face of Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., one of the nation’s largest and oft-embattled mosques, resigned after he said the mosque’s board failed to adequately address a brewing controversy over the banned practice of female genital mutilation.
The mosque’s lead imam, Shaker Elsayed, drew a wave of condemnation from Abdul-Malik and young Muslim activists earlier in the week after he appeared to endorse a certain form of female genital mutilation as sometimes necessary to prevent “hypersexuality.”
The practice — considered a human rights violation by the World Health Organization — is banned in the United States and throughout much of the world, and it has no basis in Islam’s holy text, the Koran. The mosque’s board condemned Elsayed’s comments as out of line with both U.S. and Islamic law and placed him on administrative leave.
Categories: America, Extremism, The Muslim Times, USA