Sex Scandal Imam

Sex Scandal Imam

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For Jill, any discussion about sex was off limits while growing up in her strict Muslim home.
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“I was never able to take health education classes,” Jill said. “We never discussed this with my friends or anything. I’ve never seen my parents kiss or anything. I never saw my parents hold hands.”
Jill, who wears a black hijab, agreed to be interviewed only under a pseudonym. She lives in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs with her family. Jill said she was 11 when she started taking lessons in the Quran from Imam Mohammed Abdullah Saleem, a prominent and revered leader in the community. In 1989, Saleem founded the Institute of Islamic Education in Elgin.
Jill says Saleem sexually abused her while she was his student. She can’t file criminal charges because of the statute of limitations. But Jill is one of five anonymous plaintiffs in a civil suit against Saleem and his school. A male plaintiff in the suit says another employee at the Institute abused him.
What started out as innocent praise and slight touches on her arm from Saleem during class, Jill said, turned into something else.
“(He started) moving my scarf away from my head, started kissing my cheek,” Jill said. “A month or two later, he started to touch my private parts. And this happened for like a couple of months.”
People familiar with Saleem say he’s well-liked. One person even likened him to Bill Cosby, someone who was beloved only to find their reputation shattered by allegations of sexual abuse. That’s why Jill was afraid to tell her parents, why she wanted to stay home from classes. She was terrified to tell them what she says she had gone through. The constraints of her faith did not help.
“They probably would’ve said ‘you’re probably imagining things. It’s probably nothing.’ Because they had such reverence for people of such stature,” Jill said.
Jill said she spent years in therapy before she could tell her parents about the alleged abuse. And for a time, she left Islam.
“I was just so disgusted,” Jill said. “Like how could Allah let this happen to me? It was a real long time before I understood and accepted and went back to my religion which I love.”
Nadiah Mohajir is with HEART Women & Girls , a group addressing issues of sexual health among Muslim women. She said they’ve fielded many calls since December, when a former secretary of Saleem’s told police he had assaulted her.
“Our faith does put a lot of value on modesty and privacy and purity,” Mohajir said. “I think that that is often conflated with these feelings of shame, which encourages silence around these issues.”
Dr. Mohammed Kaiseruddin heads the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. He said it’s taking actions to prevent future abuse. One step is to openly support survivors of abuse. Another is to support a community already under intense scrutiny because of terrorist attacks, and, he says, that community includes those still working and running Saleem’s institute.
“To the extent that they can come clean and become transparent because after all the community invested millions of dollars in building that institution,” Kaiseruddin said. “And for other Islamic schools, who may also face this kind of a problem if proper precautions are not taken.”
But decades after the abuse, after going to therapy and telling her family what had happened, Jill says she can’t talk about the alleged abuse openly. She said the Muslim community may not be ready to hear about these things.
“I still have to marry my kids off,” Jill said. “And I don’t want that reputation to be there. And my parents to face ‘Oh my God, that girl or that boy (is) rejected because of what you had been through.’ Because that’s just the mind of the community.”
Saleem’s attorney did not respond to calls for comment.
If Saleem is convicted on the criminal charge, Jill said she’ll feel vindicated and leave the rest to Allah.
Yolanda Perdomo is a WBEZ reporter.
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End Modern Slavery of Engage Now Africa (ENA) has helped to secure justice for a 13-year-old girl who was allegedly defiled by an Imam at Mameng, a village at Kwahyia in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
Justice Effia Addison sentenced the Imam, named Ishmaila Salam, a Nigerian, to 10 years imprisonment with hard labour due to efforts made by his team to make sure justice is served for the victim.
The complainant, Kwame Abu, father of the victim, accused the Imam, an Islamic preacher and a teacher at Masjid Ali Dawood Abu Zahriya in Kwahyia, a village near Suhum, of defiling her daughter in 2020 when she started attending Arabic studies at the said mosque.
Along the line, the victim's mother saw some ungodly play between the victim and the accused person.
The victim's mother warned the accused person to cease playing with the victim, citinewsroom.com reports.
Early this year, the victim's mother observed some changes in the victim's habit.
It was gathered that the accused person had been having sexual intercourse with her in the said mosque after their studies. The victim narrated how the accused used to have sexual intercourse with her in the mosque.
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By
Tyler O'Neil
1:29 PM on December 06, 2019

FACE photo of Moataz Moftah, an Arizona imam accused of sexual assault and other abuses.

Tags:
2019
ISLAM
SEXUAL ABUSE

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An Arizona imam has been accused of sexual assault, child abuse, misuse of funds, and falsely presenting himself as single in order to pursue female congregants while having two concealed marriages. One mosque quietly fired him after early accusations, but another has continued to employ him. An anti-Islamist Muslim reformer has condemned a media blackout on the story, suggesting that the local Muslim community is protecting a sexual predator due to radical interpretations of sharia.
“Here is the story on the imam ‘quietly’ fired from our mosque in Scottsdale,” M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), tweeted. “Apparently he was also a sexual predator. So tell me again this has nothing to do with their shariah supremacism, radicalism and affinity for radical imams like [Siraj Wahhaj]?”
Here is the story on the imam ‘quietly’ fired from our mosque in Scottsdale. Apparently he was also a sexual predator.
So tell me again this has nothing to do with their shariah supremacism, radicalism and affinity for radical imams like @SirajWahhaj ? https://t.co/sIjvZTA9j3
— M. Zuhdi Jasser زهدي جاسر (@DrZuhdiJasser) December 6, 2019
Jasser was referring to a Religion News Service (RNS) article about Moataz Moftah, an imam who teaches youth at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix. The article cites an exhaustive report from the victims’ advocacy group Facing Abuse in Community Environments (FACE) following an 11-month investigation into Moftah’s alleged misconduct. FACE released the report on November 11.
The imam’s “repetitive and egregious misconduct completely disqualifies him from serving as a religious leader, teacher or any professional employment within the Muslim community,” FACE founder Alia Salem declared in the report based on police reports from alleged victims and interviews with 34 people including Moftah.
The investigation began last year after a congregant of the Islamic Center of North East Valley in Scottsdale filed a complaint with FACE.
Moftah studied in Egypt before coming to the U.S. in 2012 to work as an imam in Indiana. He has been employed as a religious leader at five Islamic institutions and worked as a contractor for at least eight others.
According to FACE, he had been fired for misconduct from Ohio’s Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, after he allegedly concealed a marriage to a congregant he had helped convert to Islam. In 2017, she divorced him and obtained an order of protection, accusing him of violence and claiming he had married her for immigration status.
While Moftah taught at the Scottsdale mosque, several youth and parents complained he was hitting, pinching, and throwing things at students during Quran lessons, the FACE report alleged.
One woman told FACE that when she went to the mosque seeking charitable funds, Moftah told her to clean his apartment in exchange for cash. While in the apartment, he allegedly removed her hijab, kissed her, and grabbed her tightly. He then promised to give her as much money as she wanted if she kept quiet.
According to the report, Moftah counseled one Scottsdale congregant through a divorce and then married her in a ceremony in his office. Since there were no witnesses and no public announcement of the marriage, many Muslim scholars would conclude the wedding was illegal.
A few months later, he married another woman in a ceremony conducted over the phone with no witnesses, according to FACE. Both women were unaware of the other’s existence.
Meanwhile, the imam allegedly presented himself to the Muslim community as a single man in search of a wife. The report accused him of pursuing other marriage prospects, including with a woman who claimed he groped her on a date.
In March 2019, the Scottsdale mosque fired Moftah after multiple reports of misconduct. He was promptly hired by the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix.
The Moftah report is only the second one made public by FACE, which Salem founded in 2017, aiming to tackle issues of accountability and abuse in American Islamic institutions. The first report, published in October, revealed the results of a yearlong investigation into allegations of sexual exploitation, clergy malpractice, and grooming of a young woman by Texas imam Zia ul-Haque Sheikh. That investigation concluded in a $2.5 million judgment for the victor, who had been counseled as a minor.
Jasser accused local media outlets of being in “a protective coma.”
“Apparently the fact that a leading Scottsdale mosque that’s a hub for the Arizona Muslim Alliance (coalition of Phoenix mosques/schools) that had an imam that exposed our vulnerable community to predatory behavior is not worth covering?” Jasser added, bitterly. “[Bigotry] while protecting [Islamists]?”
Apparently the fact that a leading Scottsdale mosque that’s a hub for the Arizona Muslim Alliance (coalition of Phoenix mosques/schools) that had an imam that exposed our vulnerable community to predatory behavior is not worth covering? #Bigotry while protecting #Islamists ?
— M. Zuhdi Jasser زهدي جاسر (@DrZuhdiJasser) December 6, 2019
Reformers like Jasser seek to emphasize the compatibility between Islam and Western norms, pushing against Islamist interpretations of Sharia (Islamic law) that support jihadist violence, state enforcement of Islamic law, and the abuse of women. To reformers like Jasser, the stories about Moftah echo medieval Islam, which sanctioned sex slavery and polygamy. He fights against the Islamism that fueled the Islamic State to carry out similar atrocities and worse.
FACE does important work, and the media should cover it. Islamic institutions should protect women, not cover for alleged abusers like Moftah.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil .
Tyler O'Neil is an author and conservative commentator. He has written for numerous publications, including The Christian Post, National Review, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Signal, AEI's Values & Capitalism, and the Colson Center's Breakpoint. He enjoys Indian food, board games, and talking ceaselessly about politics, religion, and culture. He has appeared on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight." He is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center . Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil .

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