Imams are the messengers of Islam

His Majesty King Abdullah met a select group of imams and preachers earlier this week to emphasise their importance in teaching and sending the correct message of Islam, based on tolerance towards other religions, promoting mutual respect for other faiths, ending all forms of discrimination against fellow man and woman and upholding compassion towards others.

Imams and preachers are the messengers of Islam, and unless they truly understand in depth the true teachings of Islam and its spiritual values, their sermons would fall short of their objectives, and worse still, could do more damage than good.

Islamic countries live in an era when Islam's true teachings have been willfully hijacked by extremists, who are bent on distorting its inner values for alien goals. This is where the role of imams and preachers comes in to reverse the tide of distortions perpetrated in a bid to distort the role and message of Islam for political gains or serve the geopolitical agendas of foreign powers.

Reshaping the minds and souls of imams and preachers in the right direction is no simple mission. By the time a correct policy is introduced to rectify the existing challenge facing preachers, it is often too late, as a man's mode of thinking and religious values have been hardened to the point they become immune to any enlightened religious doctrine.

It would seem that the process of reforming preachers and imams must begin in earnest. Enlightening preachers and imams must, therefore, begin at elementary and secondary levels of education and continue to the level of higher education. This process of reformation must also envisage having imams and preachers address in their sermons everyday concerns of people, including how to deal with high inflationary trends and how to make ends meet.

In other words, contemporary sermons must show the way how the true teachings of Islam and its inner values can be invoked in the search for solutions to mundane economic, social and even political challenges. This is after all what Islam is all about.