The conversation has happened so many times now that I have stopped being surprised by it. Different rooms, different cities, different institutions—masajid I have served in directly, organizations I have consulted with formally and informally over more than a decade—and yet the shape of the discussion is always the same. How do we increase attendance? How do we sustain the budget? How do we improve programming quality? How do we reach more people on social media? Reasonable questions. Necessary questions. I have asked them myself.
And yet something is always missing from these conversations. Not because it was removed, but because it was never placed on the agenda in the first place.
Nobody asks whether the people who attend feel connected to one another. Nobody asks what happened to the family that stopped coming—not whether they can be recovered as a data point on a quarterly report, but whether anyone noticed they left as people. There is strategy for growth and budgeting for financial sustainability, but no equal emphasis on the stability of relationships, on whether the people inside the building are being formed into a body or merely counted as a crowd.
The first time I noticed this absence, it unsettled me. By the tenth time, I realized the absence was not unusual. It was the norm. Across leadership structures, across regions—the disappearance of connectedness as a priority had become so complete that it no longer registered as a loss. That normalization is what this essay is about.
Before the Fortress
Before September 11th, the American masjid was not a better institution. It was a different one.
The orientation was relational rather than transactional. People came because it was their masjid—not because it was the best one within a thirty-minute drive. The imam was not a performer evaluated by production value. The congregation was not an audience rating a product. What mattered was not whether the khutba (sermon) was polished but whether the person next to you knew your name.
This was not ideal. The relational orientation was real, but it was bounded. People attended masajid based on ethnic familiarity—the Desi masjid, the Arab masjid, the Blackamerican masjid—and that sorting meant the loyalty was often to a cultural enclave as much as to a spiritual home. The uncles who built the masjid saw it as an extension of their family, and in many cases it literally was: their relatives on the board, their language in the khutba, their customs setting the social tone. If you fit, you belonged. If you did not, you found the masjid where you did. That is already a form of selection—choosing based on comfort rather than commitment, proximity to the familiar rather than formation in the sacred. It was not consumerism in the way we would later come to practice it, but the seed of sorting was already planted in the soil.
But the people, for all those limitations, were developing. Slowly, imperfectly, but moving forward. New institutions were beginning to emerge—Islamic schools, social organizations, professional networks—the early stages of a broader ecosystem that might have eventually distributed the communal weight the way other faith traditions in America had learned to do.
At the same time, a deeper shift was underway that few people named. The congregation was westernizing. I saw it in my own generation—children who prayed at the masjid on weekends but absorbed a fundamentally different operating system the other five days. The immigrant generation still carried collectivistic instincts—interdependence, mutual obligation, loyalty to the group over the self—but their children were being formed in American schools, American social expectations, American individualism. The older generation related to the masjid the way they related to their household: it was theirs to build, to maintain, to sacrifice for without calculation. My generation related to it the way we related to everything else—as a place we could leave. The orientation was thinning. Not disappearing, but thinning—and no one was naming it because the prayer lines were still full.
This matters because it determines how the trauma would land.
When the World Contracted
September 11th was not merely an event the American Muslim community witnessed. It was a collective trauma that reshaped how we related to ourselves and to the broader society.
The masjid—already the central institution—became the fortress. The one place that felt safe. The one institution under communal control. And into that fortress, we compressed everything: prayer space, school, social hall, relief agency, counseling center, youth program, cultural gathering, coffee hour. The masjid became the one-stop-shop for every communal need. I have served in buildings carrying all of those functions simultaneously. The weight is real.
This stalled the development that was already underway. Jewish communities in America built distributed ecosystems over generations—JCCs, independent day schools, philanthropic federations, cultural organizations—where the synagogue was one institution among many. Christian communities built churches alongside YMCAs, parish schools, independent ministries, and community centers. No single building had to carry everything. These traditions also had advantages we did not—generations of established wealth, access to mainstream philanthropic infrastructure, and decades of institutional learning. The comparison is not perfectly symmetrical. But the structural principle holds: when communal life is distributed across many institutions, no single one collapses under the weight.
The American Muslim community never got the chance to build that. The trauma froze us mid-development. The independent schools, social spaces, and philanthropic structures that might have emerged naturally were absorbed into the masjid or simply never materialized. The mosque was never designed to carry what we loaded onto it.
The contraction was understandable. Traumatized people seek shelter in what they know. But understandable responses, when they become permanent postures, produce consequences no one intended. The fact that the contraction made sense in 2001 does not mean it should have remained the operating model for the next quarter century.
And the trauma landed on a people whose collectivistic resilience was already weakening. A congregation with deeper intergenerational bonds might have contracted temporarily and then re-expanded—metabolized the shock and returned to the slow work of building. But a people already mid-transition, already losing the relational instincts that absorb collective grief, were uniquely vulnerable. The contraction held. The fortress remained.
What We Chose Without Choosing
The masjid did not have to operate like a service provider. The compression of every communal function into a single building created enormous pressure, but pressure does not dictate response—it reveals disposition. We could have absorbed the additional roles while maintaining a relational core. We could have paused to ask: what kind of institution do we want to become, and what kind of people will it form over the next twenty years?
But we did not ask. We merely responded to the times.
I want to be fair here. The boards that made these decisions were not operating in a vacuum of obvious alternatives. In 2003, a masjid board under siege—navigating government scrutiny, media hostility, frightened congregants, and a building that suddenly had to be everything—did not have the luxury of a twenty-year strategic retreat. They did what they could with what they had. The failure was not malice. It was the absence of deliberation under conditions that made deliberation feel like a luxury no one could afford.
The transactional operating model—attendance as the measure of success, aesthetics as a priority, programming evaluated as product—was not inevitable. It was the most available model, adopted without deliberation about its long-term consequences. When a single building is trying to be a school, a relief agency, a social club, a counseling office, and a house of worship simultaneously, the only metrics that function across all of those roles are numerical: attendance, revenue, event turnout, social media reach. The relational questions—do people feel known? Is suhba (spiritual companionship) forming? Are families being held through difficulty?—do not scale across that kind of overload. They require focused attention. And focused attention is precisely what the overstretched masjid could no longer afford.
I want to be precise about what I am critiquing. Professionalism—running an institution with competence, transparency, strategic planning, and excellence—is not the problem. Professionalism is good. It is necessary. It brought visibility, credibility, and operational capacity that the pre-September 11th model lacked. What I am naming is something different: consumerism. The moment when the metrics of professionalism replace the purpose of the institution. When the building runs well but the people inside it are not being formed. When the operation is excellent and the organism is dying. That is the line the American masjid crossed without noticing—not because it pursued excellence, but because excellence became the goal rather than the means.
Boards learned to measure what could be counted. What could not be counted—connectedness, spiritual formation, the slow work of building people into a body—quietly disappeared from the conversation. Not because anyone decided it was unimportant. Because the operating logic no longer had room for it. The agenda filled itself with what was measurable, and what was immeasurable became invisible.
This is how a people can be full of well-intentioned leaders, making individually reasonable decisions, and still produce an institution that forms its members in ways no one intended. The product was not designed. It emerged—from reactive decisions stacked on top of one another, none of them examined, all of them compounding.
The Covenant We Lost
I know the congregant who drives past three masajid to attend the one with the most polished khutba, the most engaging youth program, the most aesthetically pleasing Ramadan production. I have been that congregant. And the uncomfortable truth is that this person is not inherently disloyal. They are behaving exactly as the model trained them to behave.
The system selected for this. Boards that measured success by attendance incentivized programming that attracted attendance. Programming that attracted attendance was programming that competed—with other masajid, with other weekend options, with the comfort of staying home. The congregant learned to evaluate, compare, and choose. They became consumers.
But there is a difference between rational behavior and faithful behavior. The consumer optimizes. The faithful commit. A consumer relationship with the masjid produces someone who evaluates every interaction by what they received. A covenantal relationship—the kind the Prophet ﷺ described when he said the believers are like a single building whose parts reinforce one another1—produces someone who asks what they owe. The shift from covenant to consumption happened so gradually that most people never noticed it. I did not notice it in myself for years.
The westernization that was already underway before September 11th accelerated this. A collectivistic people give out of obligation to the body: this is my masjid and I sustain it because it is mine. An individualistic people give based on evaluation: this masjid must earn my donation by meeting my expectations. The cultural shift and the operational shift reinforced each other. By the time either was visible, both were entrenched.
As I wrote in Cultivating Community: The Juice Is Worth the Squeeze, we are now conditioned to think of the masjid in capitalist terms—where success and failure are determined by aesthetics or attendance rather than formation or impact. That produces a parasitic dynamic: institutions competing for atomized participants who establish no loyal membership anywhere because they were never offered anything worth being loyal to.
The Soil That Disappeared
When the congregant relates to the masjid as a consumer, they do not remain long enough for suhba to take root. Suhba requires sustained presence with the same people over time—the friction, the patience, the slow accumulation of trust that only comes from choosing not to leave when it gets hard. A consumer does not stay. A consumer optimizes. And when the congregation is populated by optimizers, the soil in which loyalty, trust, and genuine companionship grow is simply not there.
The loss is not abstract. I have watched it. Suhba, when it is present, produces people who know each other beyond their public roles—who carry each other’s burdens without being asked, who hold each other accountable because the relationship has earned that right. Its absence produces masajid that are crowded on Friday and vacant on Wednesday. Buildings that can fill a banquet hall for a fundraiser but cannot find fifteen people for a janaza (funeral) prayer on a weekday afternoon.
The Prophetic model of suhba was not fellowship; it was formation—a climate of nearness where habits of mercy were rehearsed until they became native. As I explored in When Companionship Became a Community, the architecture the Prophet ﷺ built in Madinah was not a program. It was a covenant—mu’akha (brotherhood) that organized sacrifice, vulnerability, and presence into a way of life. What the transactional masjid dissolved was not merely social connection. It was the formational infrastructure through which character is transmitted from one soul to another.
The conditions that push clergy toward itinerant work—the phenomenon I described in Dawah Mercenaries, OnlyImams, and the Structural Genocide of the American Muslim Community—are produced by this same environment. When congregants are consumers, the imam becomes a product. And when the imam is evaluated as a product, the rational move is to serve the broadest market rather than the deepest congregation. The supply-side crisis of religious leadership is inseparable from the demand-side crisis of congregant formation. They are the same wound, viewed from different angles.
Not Broken—Formed
Millennials and Generation Z did not choose the transactional model. They were formed inside it.
They arrived at masajid that were already operating as one-stop-shop service providers. They learned to relate to the institution the way they relate to every other institution in their lives—by evaluating the product. The masjid taught them this. The broader culture reinforced it. By the time they were old enough to give, to serve, to lead, the transactional orientation was not a choice they had made. It was the only way they had ever known.
The economic reality is real. This generation carries less concentrated wealth, different financial structures, and debt burdens their parents did not face. But the deeper issue is not financial. It is relational, cultural, and spiritual. They have less money and less attachment and less collectivistic instinct and less practice in the kind of sacrificial membership that built the institutions they inherited. They were never taught that belonging requires investment beyond attendance, that sustaining a masjid is an act of worship even when the masjid frustrates you. They were taught, by the very institutions that now lament their disengagement, that the masjid is a product to be consumed.
This is not a character flaw in a generation. It is a formation failure that belongs to the generation before them. The formers bear the responsibility, not the formed.
A Crisis That Compounds
What the previous sections describe is not a sequence that already happened. It is a cycle that is still turning.
The transactional operating model trains congregants to consume. Consumers do not build suhba. Without suhba, the next generation is formed without models of sacrificial membership. That generation—less attached, less practiced in commitment, shaped entirely inside the market logic—eventually inherits governance of the very institutions that formed them. They become the boards, the committee chairs, the decision-makers. And they govern with the only logic they were taught: attendance, aesthetics, economic viability. The cycle begins again. One turn deeper.
Each rotation produces a generation less equipped to break it. The institutions grow more transactional because the people leading them have never experienced an alternative. The congregants grow more detached because the institutions have never offered them anything else. And the clergy—caught between the two—either adapt to the market or leave it. Some communities have resisted this trajectory. They are the proof that alternatives exist, and their example deserves its own examination. But the prevailing pattern is clear, and it is accelerating.
This is not a crisis that stabilizes. It compounds. And it will persist until we find alternatives to the operating logic that is producing it.
The thread running through every layer of this problem is the same: reaction without deliberation. We absorbed Western individualism without interrogating it. We contracted after September 11th without strategic reflection. We adopted transactional operations without considering what they would produce a generation later. Each generation inherited the previous generation’s reactive decisions and made their own reactive decisions on top of them. Breaking the cycle requires something we have not practiced in twenty-five years: the discipline to pause before responding, and to ask what any given response will cost before committing to it.
What I Can See From Here
I write this from inside the role—as someone who has served in masajid, watched this cycle from the inside, and participated in its logic. I am not outside the system diagnosing it. I am inside the system confessing what it looks like from where I stand.
And from where I stand, the lever is visible. It is not in the imam’s hands.
The structural conditions of masjid employment—board authority, financial dependence, expectations that rise without matching resources—mean that clergy cannot repair this from their position. That is not despair. That is where the power sits. The imam can see the crisis with painful clarity. But seeing and having the authority to act are different things, and the gap between them is where much of the burnout, disillusionment, and exodus of religious leadership begins.
The imperative falls to the congregation itself.
On the individual level, every person must recognize the mandate of the time. The forces of atomization and fragmentation that characterize this era are not unique to Muslims, but the obligation to resist them is specifically ours. Allah tells us to hold firmly to His rope and not be divided.2 Building genuine belonging has always demanded sacrifice. The fact that our current structures have made it harder does not release us from the work. It makes the work more urgent.
What does that look like in practice? It looks like choosing a masjid and staying—through the bad khutbas, through the board decisions that frustrate you, through the seasons when nothing about the place feels nourishing. It looks like learning the name of the person who always sits in the same row and never speaks to anyone. It looks like attending the janaza of someone you barely knew, because that is what a body does when one of its members dies. Commitment, vulnerability, initiative—these are the counter-rhythms that must replace the consumer reflex. They are not dramatic. They are daily. And they are the only soil in which suhba grows.
But individual commitment alone will not change the operating logic. Something else must happen—something I have learned the hard way from inside the role.
The people closest to the congregation’s interior life—religious leaders, pastoral counselors, educators, the volunteers who sit with families in crisis and notice which young people are drifting—these people see things that governance does not see. I have sat across from a board presentation celebrating record Ramadan attendance in the same month that three families quietly and permanently left the masjid. The numbers and the reality were telling two different stories. No one in the boardroom knew. The people on the ground knew. They always know.
I am not saying clergy must run the institution. I am saying that the people who see the human cost of governance decisions must be in the room when those decisions are made—not as employees receiving directives, but as voices whose knowledge is irreplaceable. When governance operates in isolation from the people closest to the congregation’s pulse, it makes decisions that look sound on paper and produce damage that only surfaces years later.
And whatever we build going forward, it must be measured against the tradition’s own priorities—not borrowed wholesale from corporate models and assumed to be spiritually neutral. Are we forming people, or are we filling rooms? Allah described the believers as brothers and commanded us to reconcile and to be mindful so that mercy may descend.3 That is the measure. If the metrics we use to evaluate our masajid cannot account for mercy, for formation, for whether people are actually being drawn closer to Allah and to each other, then those metrics are the wrong instruments—and the outcomes they produce will reflect their origin. The damage of misaligned priorities does not announce itself. It compounds quietly, across years, until the building looks robust and the body inside it has gone cold.
On the communal level, some people must pursue institutional power. Board positions. Governance roles. Strategic authority. The operating logic will not change from outside the boardroom.
But this pursuit carries weight. A board seat is not a volunteer title. It is an amanah (trust) whose decisions shape the formation of a congregation across generations. As I wrote in Making Excuses vs. Accountability, the further an injustice’s impact extends, the greater the accountability required. Passiveness toward the consequences of governance decisions—making excuses, maintaining good opinions without demanding change—enables the very cycle this essay describes. The congregation that watches its institutions adopt operating models that hollow out connectedness and says nothing is complicit in what those models produce.
And the history of masjid governance carries a warning that must be heard before the pursuit begins. It is full of people who sought those positions out of righteous frustration and then, once inside, reproduced the very dynamics they set out to dismantle. I have watched it happen. Power reshapes the person who holds it. The individual who fights to get on the board to change things must fight equally hard not to become what they replaced. Tawadu’ (humility) is required before the role, during the role, and after the role. The perspective and sincerity that motivated the pursuit must survive the authority the pursuit delivers.
Both movements are necessary. Neither is sufficient alone. The person who commits to the congregation but never engages its governance leaves the institution in the hands of the same logic. The person who pursues governance but loses their humility becomes the next iteration of the problem.
I do not have a program for this. I proposed solutions three years ago, and the structural conditions have not changed. What I have now is something the earlier essay could not carry: the honest weight of a problem that is deeper than programs. We must do this work—the slow, sacred, unglamorous labor of rebuilding connectedness as a priority, of diversifying our institutional ecosystem, of forming the next generation in something other than consumption. And those of us inside the clergy role will do what we have always done: witness, counsel, pray, and trust that Allah places barakah (blessing) in the hands of those who arrive with sincerity, even when they cannot see the way through.
Ultimately, with Allah is all success.
Quran 3:103.
Quran 49:10.
Deeply heartfelt and uncomprising in its honesty and compassion for our communities and Masajid. Jazakum Allah Khayran, Imam Abdul-Malik 🤲