Imam Wanted
Ahmed Elbasyouney and Ilana Gershon
At some point, every mosque faces a commonplace organizational problem—they have to find an imam to fill a vacancy. In the United States, mosques accomplish this using a secular ritual, a hiring process complete with job interviews and resumes. This means that in order to get hired, an imam has to figure out how to describe his spiritual practices and expertise in the form of a resume, a genre first developed to help corporate hiring managers sort through job applications during a wave of urbanization in the 1910s. Contemporary capitalism has changed what resumes are supposed to look like—and now many hopeful imam applicants feel obligated to list the keywords that comprise their personal brand, or provide bullet-points listing all the tasks they accomplished in their various positions. Yet what personal brand keywords are appropriate for a spiritual leader? How does an imam in the United States use the secular genre of a resume to show how employable they are?
To begin answering these questions, we decided to look at a sample of imam resumes available online or through our informal connections, targeting US jobs. We found ten resumes, some offered up as templates, some through private channels, and others available on websites that collect resumes of all types for potential recruiters or hiring committees. Having studied corporate resumes before, we expected to see a fairly standardized template: someone’s name, brief self-description, some key words, and then a list of previous positions with descriptions. In corporate America, there are no shortage of ways to learn how to craft a resume in a standardized model. There are free resume workshops offered in every city, countless templates online, and many resume writers available for hire. Yet imam resumes are striking for how varied they are. Some focus on how much of the Qur’an the imam has memorized but make no mention of other skills; others stress how effective they have been in interfaith dialogue but say nothing about their engagement with religious texts. The formatting varies widely, as do the skills mentioned, as well as the kinds of explanations of what they did in previous positions. Yet all the imams struggle with the same problem—how to make their spiritual leadership legible for potential employers.
How do these resumes capture the specific religious relationship between God and imams? In the majority of resumes we examined, God rarely appears. Resumes are more likely to mention acts and tasks like prayers, religious counseling, khutbahs, and matrimonial and funerary services. Few refer to God or the Prophet Mohammed. In fact, they are more likely to mention soft skills, language skills, fundraising, and cultural understanding than any spiritual qualification. With the exception of one resume, all resumes use secular language towards God and refrain, for example, from using adjectives like “Almighty” before God, “holy” before Qur’an, or from using the phrase “peace be upon him” after the name of the Prophet. Clearly, a professional and concise resume is also one that only attests in the most glancing manner to an imam’s relationship to God.
Resumes by their very nature are documents that try to distinguish the applicant from a field of competitors. Imams are thus faced with the odd task of trying to describe how they are especially proficient at tasks. These are tasks that are rarely enumerated in a list. They tend to be taken-for-granted parts of the job—or indeed, of being a decent human being—such as, “respond to requests for assistance during emergencies or crises.” What does being explicit about certain tasks imply? Perhaps listing this as a job task on a resume opens the door to evaluating whether one is especially good at responding to requests for assistance, as well as suggesting that other applicants might not do so. Other tasks listed can function as signals of hierarchy, letting resume evaluators know that the applicant was functionally operating as a senior imam at a previous mosque. No resume discussed mentoring other imams, which would be an explicit marker of seniority. A number of resumes did, however, list all the prayers that the imam led over the course of a year, which served the purpose of positioning the applicant as senior in mosques with multiple imams (although not when they were the only imam at that mosque).
A large number of resumes focused on certificates, echoing Susan Ellison’s insights into how collecting certificates becomes a marker of an enhanceable and properly managed self, which she discusses in her 2018 book, Domesticating Democracy. The certificates mentioned in the Imams’ resumes were a fairly diffuse collection—one might expect mentions of Ijazahs or awards for winning Quranic competitions in memorization or in recitation. Yet there were also mentions of graduate diplomas in Islamic studies or some other discipline and certificates for completing self-development courses such as “Confidence and Knowing Yourself,” “Planning for Future,” “Communications and Discussing,” and others with equally vague self-help titles. Success was not only marked by these secular achievements but also by quantifiable approaches to Muslim knowledge. We found that, in several resumes, imams list the classical literature that they had memorized in bullet points. One imam, for instance, listed the seven Islamic classical books that he memorized in addition to mentioning some of those he read. Job ads encouraged this. We found one that requires candidates to fill out a form in which they attest to the percentage of the Qur’an that they have memorized.
The wide range in formats means that imam resumes did not reliably reflect dominant neoliberal takes on how to be an employable self, yet when a resume did seem heavily influenced by neoliberal fashions in resumes, it was telling. How does one craft an imam resume that would be legible to corporate America? One lists skills and qualities at the top, stressing, for example, language skills. But one also discusses one’s skills at responding to Muslims from diverse backgrounds, as well as one’s skill at participating in interfaith dialogue (an increasingly common duty). These resumes stress, in many bullet point entries, the applicant’s ability to engage with difference productively and diplomatically. The specifics of the religion are often erased in the descriptions. One applicant, for example, includes this bullet point: “instruct people who seek conversion to a particular faith.” Yet, presumably, it is not any faith that the imam helps people to convert to—it is Islam. The handful of more neoliberal resumes also discuss the applicant’s fundraising abilities, with the term “fundraising” often re-framing Islamic practices of donation. All of this is a sharp contrast with other resumes that primarily discuss how much of the Qur’an and other holy texts the applicant has memorized, or primarily lists previous positions and educational experiences, without long lists of bullet points under each position. The neoliberal imam resumes encourages the applicant to frame their spiritual practices in terms of the secular demands of modern US bureaucratic institutions, the demands Winni Sullivan so aptly addresses in her 2014 book, A Ministry of Presence.
Resumes as a genre are meant to showcase, in abbreviated form, the applicant’s professional accomplishments. How do imams depict success in their resumes? A number of imams frame success in terms of communicative skills and linguistic abilities—their fluency in reading classical Arabic, adeptness at cultural dualism (whatever that might mean), and their ability to engage with women, children, and youth. Other skills mentioned in the majority of resumes were interpersonal skills like teamwork, time management, and public speaking, as well as computer skills such as Microsoft Office and internet browsing (we were surprised to see internet browsing elevated to resume-worthy status). In addition, for imams, a new genre has joined all the other forms of evidence required for a job application—two resumes provided links to the imam’s YouTube channel. Imams could also measure success in terms of their visibility with other institutions. One candidate stated that he managed to “expand mosque recognition in the national press,” another addressed how adept he was at maintaining good relations with law enforcement, which has been increasingly critical since 9/11.
In modern-day corporate America, finding a new imam often resembles other white-collar hiring rituals: search committees, job postings, resumes, references, job application forms, onsite interviews, shortlists, teaching demonstrations, community feedback forms, and so on. Both the ads and the resumes emphasize not only the religious credentials required, but also how an imam can be a so-called good fit for the job by representing the mosque to other cultural and interfaith organizations or the press. imams can become swept up by a diversity rhetoric, expected to “relate to youth,” and, as a job ad from Masjid Annur Incorporated of Sacramento, California, required: “prevent discrimination on any basis including but not limited to school of thought, gender, race, nationality, ethnic origin, citizenship, political affiliation, or economic status.” Hailed by a diversity framework, imams respond in their resumes by borrowing from a neoliberal lexicon, describing Muslims as a “target audience,” mosques as “mission-oriented organizations,” and attesting to skills like community outreach, public relations, and fundraising.
Through the most humdrum of documents, US mosques’ contemporary gatekeeping rituals for imams introduce secular, even neoliberal, criteria into the very heart of the process of hiring a community’s spiritual leader. This quick foray into one set of resumes raises more questions than it answers: how do different religious traditions engage with the hiring ritual—currently an intensely documentary ritual in which applicants of all types must compile a compelling genre repertoire to prove their employability? Do applicants represent themselves as spiritual leaders differently in different traditions? Is there more standardization in some spiritual traditions than others, and, if so, what does an increase in standardized genres reveal about a spiritual community’s longstanding historical engagement with forms of capitalism that might encourage such standardization? To what degree do ideas about how to prove one’s employability from corporate arenas infiltrate religious hiring practices, and what are the consequences of this type of mixing? And lastly, how are hiring decisions made in practice? How are evaluators making decisions based on these documents, and how are they interpreting these documents in different religious traditions?
Ahmed Elbasyouny is a PhD fellow of law and democracy at the Indiana University Center for Constitutional Democracy. He holds an LLM from Central European University, and he works in the fields of constitutional design and policy advice.
Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Halls professor of anthropology at Indiana University where her research explores how neoliberal logics might influence people’s experiences with socially complex ritualized encounters, such as hiring or breaking up. Her most recent book is on corporate hiring in the United States, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find Work (or Don't) Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Her current book project explores the pandemic workplace as a site of private government and source of Americans’ political imaginations. She also edited A World of Work: Imagined Manuals for Real Jobs (Cornell University Press, 2015).