Perceptions Of Me And My Imama

I have just recalled an interesting experience from my Umrah trip that has to do with perceptions.  Among the many things I took with me, I packed my immam/turban (how do you spell that?) I have many imamas, white ones, black ones, even a green one and emamas of different styles and I found that wearing them brought about different reactions from the Muslims.

This is picture of me in Madina in 2007 and I am sporting a white imama.  This type of imama is my favourite type and I wear it most of the time when I am out and about.

When I wore this in Mecca and Madina I had many people approach me.  This is something I am used to; a white English bloke wearing jubba and imama is quite interesting to some people,  but this time they were not asking me for my conversion story.

More than one person would look at me and say “Tablighi?” I struggled to reply to that more often than not.  I would occasionally say no, but yes…then qualify that with, lots of hand signals and for the ones who spoke English I would say; “well, I have been in Jammat (a few years ago) but don’t now really, although I totally respect and love what the brothers do.  So, no I’m not really a Tablighi but yes, I do look like them don’t I ?”

I have never liked being labelled as this or that, but people love to, it is human nature after all.  But what I have found whilst travelling the Muslim world is that whatever you wear means something.  I have worn the same white imama in Egypt and had people thinking I was a scholar, lol.

I remember Shaykh Muhammad al Yaqoubi saying something similar in a dars in Birmingham a couple of years ago.  He said that an Imama in Syria means scholarship, one type means Mufti another type means Tasawwuf.

I wore the Malaysian style imama on two occasions in Mecca and I had one brother warning me about and staying away from bidah whilst looking at my imama.  He persisted for 20 mins after Fajr…!

Wearing the same Imama I had an aunti from Turkey asking me if I knew Shaykh Nazim and requesting that I pass on her salams to him.  No longer than one hour later I had three Turkish brothers speaking to me about this sufi shaykh from Turkey and giving me the thumbs up.  To this day I am not sure if they thought that i was him or if they thought I was part of his tariqa.

I wore the black Imama on another occasion and walked passed this Afghani brother who was seated, he looked up at me with a very strange expression, he stood up and grabbed my hand and started shaking it.

All of these incidents were quite strange.  I wear the imama to follow the sunnah and not to be identified with any particular group but I have come to learn that by doing so, people will assume all kinds of things about me.

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