Shepherds of Faith, Teachers of Generations
“The scholars are the heirs of the Prophets.” The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Sunan Abi Dawud
### Before There Was an Imam <a id="before-there-was-an-imam"></a>
In the earliest years of Masjid Al-Rahmah’s construction, from 1981 to 1983, the community had no resident imam at all. Congregational prayers were led by qualified community members — physicians, engineers, and elders who had learned the Qur’an in their countries of origin and were trusted to lead their brothers and sisters in salah. This was itself an expression of ISB’s founding character: that leadership in prayer, as in all things, belonged to whoever was most qualified and most willing to serve, not to any office or title. It would not remain this way for long. The community understood that a masjid, however modest its beginnings, eventually requires more than capable volunteers leading prayer — it requires a scholar capable of teaching, counseling, and shepherding a congregation through the ordinary and extraordinary moments of its collective life.
### Imam Mohamed Adam El-Sheikh — A Founding Scholar <a id="imam-mohamed-adam-el-sheikh-a-founding-scholar"></a>
The arrival of Imam Mohamed Adam El-Sheikh in 1983 answered that need. A distinguished scholar of Qur’an, Sunnah, and Islamic jurisprudence, he brought the masjid its first sustained tradition of learned pastoral leadership — and it was he who proposed the name Masjid Al-Rahmah, the Masjid of Mercy, by which the community’s house of worship has been known ever since. He served as ISB’s first resident imam from 1983 to 1989, and returned for a second period of service from 1994 to 2003 — bookending, and in many ways defining, the masjid’s first two decades. His insistence that a beautiful building means little unless it cultivates sincere worship and good character, and his humility in delivering that message, left an imprint on ISB’s institutional culture that endures in the community’s self-understanding to this day.
### A Season of Outreach — Imam Mohamad Bashar Arafat, 1989–1993 <a id="a-season-of-outreach-imam-mohamad-bashar-arafat-1989"></a>
Between Imam Adam El-Sheikh’s two terms of service, Imam Mohamad Bashar Arafat served as ISB’s Resident Imam and Outreach Director from 1989 to 1993. His tenure reflected a recognition that would become increasingly central to ISB’s identity in later decades — that a masjid’s mission extends beyond its own congregation into dialogue with the wider community. The outreach work Imam Arafat began in these years planted seeds that would flower more fully in the interfaith and civic engagement chronicled later in this volume.
### Teachers of the Qur’an — Ustadh Kasim (Qasim) Burmi and Hafiz Hammad Hai <a id="teachers-of-the-quran-ustadh-kasim-qasim-burmi-and"></a>
Alongside the masjid’s resident imams, a parallel and equally essential tradition of Qur’anic education was taking root. From 1984 to 2000, Ustadh Kasim (Qasim) Burmi served as the community’s early Qur’an Education Lead Teacher, laying the pedagogical foundation for what would become Al-Rahmah Qur’an Academy. During these same years, Hafiz Hammad Hai — the first student to complete the memorization of the Qur’an (hifz) under ISB’s instruction — became the masjid’s lead Taraweeh imam, reciting the completed Qur’an before the congregation each Ramadan and embodying, in his own life, the harvest that years of volunteer teaching had made possible.
### A New Generation of Scholars — 2000–2003 <a id="a-new-generation-of-scholars-2000-2003"></a>
Around the turn of the millennium, Masjid Al-Rahmah’s scholarly bench began to deepen substantially. Dr. Ra’id Awadallah joined as Resident Scholar, teacher, khateeb, and religious educator, teaching Qur’an, tafsir, Arabic, and Islamic subjects while delivering khutbahs and lectures and participating in halaqahs and community programs — a role he has now sustained for more than two decades. He remains an ISB Resident Scholar; at the 2026 Baltimore Seerah Conference he taught a session on the Seerah and contemporary questions of faith, making him one of the longest-serving members of ISB’s contemporary scholarly team.
The same years saw the founding, around 1999–2000, of the Tahfizul Qur’an program that would grow into the Al-Rahmah Qur’an Academy (AQA). Qari Muhammad Zahid and Qari Muhammad Abid built the program from its modest beginnings into one of ISB’s most enduring educational achievements — a partnership that has now spanned more than two decades. Qari Zahid, who serves as Director of the Boys’ Hifz Program, has overseen Qur’an memorization, recitation and revision, and the supervision and development of Hifz students, including oversight of admission into the Evening/Part-Time Hifz Program in 2021–2022; the Academy reports that its Tahfiz program has produced more than 200 Huffaz under his and Qari Abid’s leadership. Qari Abid, now Associate Director of the Boys’ Hifz Program, worked alongside him from the program’s formative period, teaching Hifz and strengthening generations of students’ recitation and memorization until they completed the Qur’an in full.
Imam Syed Imran and Imam Mohammed Ibrahim Kamara each served as Resident Imam in these same early years, and Ustadha Humera Zahid took up leadership of the Qur’an Academy’s women’s education program — extending, alongside Qari Zahid and Qari Abid’s work with the boys, the same chain of Qur’anic transmission that Ustadh Kasim (Qasim) Burmi and Hafiz Hammad Hai had begun a generation earlier.
### Building the Qur’an Academy — 2005–2010 <a id="building-the-quran-academy-2005-2010"></a>
By the mid-2000s, ISB’s Qur’anic education program had grown enough to require a wider teaching staff. Shaykh Irfan Kabiruddin served as an Imam of ISB during these years, combining religious leadership with education, youth engagement, and outreach beyond the masjid; in October 2005, UMBC’s Retriever Weekly identified him as ISB’s Imam and reported that he visited the UMBC campus every Wednesday to teach Muslim students and answer their religious questions, and in October 2006 he represented the Muslim community at the Baltimore interfaith program “Under the Tent of Abraham: Answering the Interfaith Call to Peace.” Available records place his service at ISB in 2005–2006.
Alongside him, Hafiz Zia Abbasi and Hafiz Zubair Abbasi took up teaching leadership within the Qur’an Academy beginning in 2005, contributing to the Boys’ Hifz program through Qur’an memorization, recitation, revision, and the disciplined teacher-student relationship that Hifz study requires; Hafiz Zia Abbasi continues to appear on the Academy’s current teaching roster. Five years later, in 2010, Hafidha Sara Husain extended the Academy’s reach further still, founding its girls’ Qur’an education program.
### Shaykh Yaseen Shaikh — Two Periods of Service, 2013–2026 <a id="shaykh-yaseen-shaikh-two-periods-of-service-2013-2026"></a>
Shaykh Yaseen Shaikh first joined Masjid Al-Rahmah as a Resident Scholar in 2013, serving the congregation through khutbahs, Islamic instruction, youth development, counseling, Qur’an Academy and Al-Rahmah School activities, and community religious guidance until 2017. After an interval away from ISB, he returned in 2021 as Lead Resident Scholar and Director/Head of Outreach and Community Affairs, a role in which he has addressed dawah and convert support through Clean Slates, interfaith and civic outreach, religious education, community representation, ISB Travels, khutbahs, and Qur’an programs — and, with particular candor, the unfinished work of full inclusion for Baltimore’s African American Muslim community (see Appendix I). He continued in that role into 2026.
### Imam Ismet Akçin and Shaykh Saad Baig — 2018 <a id="imam-ismet-akcin-and-shaykh-saad-baig-2018"></a>
In 2018, Imam Ismet Akçin was appointed Principal Imam of Masjid Al-Rahmah, assuming the pastoral and scholarly leadership of the masjid’s daily religious life, its Friday khutbahs, and its ongoing tajweed instruction. The same year, Shaykh Saad Baig joined ISB’s educational system as Director of Arabic, Islamic and Qur’an Studies at Al-Rahmah School, later assuming far broader responsibilities as Resident Scholar, chaplain, educator, counselor, outreach leader, and eventually Head of School — a portfolio spanning religious instruction, pastoral and family guidance, community outreach, interfaith engagement, and educational leadership that bridges ISB’s masjid, religious-affairs, educational, counseling, and community-outreach functions.
### Shaykh Haris Qudsi — 2020–2021 <a id="shaykh-haris-qudsi-2020-2021"></a>
Shaykh Haris Qudsi served as a Resident Scholar during approximately 2020–2021, contributing to Islamic education, youth engagement, lectures, khutbahs, and community religious programming during a demanding period in the masjid’s recent history. His tenure formed part of ISB’s expansion of a resident-scholar model in which religious leadership extended beyond formal sermons to education and direct engagement with younger Muslims and families. After completing his period of resident service, he continued Islamic leadership elsewhere in Maryland as Imam of the Islamic Center of Owings Mills, while ISB has continued to welcome him back as a guest scholar, including at its 2026 Seerah Conference.
### A Rising Generation — 2023–2026 <a id="a-rising-generation-2023-2026"></a>
Shaykh Muhammad Ahmed joined ISB’s scholarly team in 2023 as Resident Scholar and Youth Director, with a particular focus on rebuilding the connection between the masjid and teenagers, college students, and young professionals; in 2023–2024 he helped establish Revive, a weekly young-adult program combining Islamic learning, spiritual development, fellowship, networking, and discussion of issues affecting young Muslims, which by early 2024 was already drawing more than 150 young adults each week. He subsequently continued as an ISB Resident Scholar while pursuing further studies abroad, maintaining his connection to the community through online teaching and programming.
Shaykh Zaki Ali succeeded him as Resident Scholar and Youth Director in 2025, bringing Qur’anic training and formal Islamic studies to ISB’s expanding youth and young-adult programs through teaching, mentorship, lectures, and halaqahs; ISB’s 2026 Seerah Conference placed him in both a special Shama’il session and a young-professionals discussion, illustrating the blend of traditional instruction and contemporary youth engagement that now characterizes his role. Alongside this line of resident scholars, Ustadha Ieasha Prime and Aalimah Maryam Ismail have carried forward ISB’s women’s Islamic education into the present day.
### Shepherds, Not Merely Speakers <a id="shepherds-not-merely-speakers"></a>
What unites this varied company of imams, resident scholars, and Qur’an teachers — separated by decades, by country of origin, by the particular emphasis of their scholarship — is a shared understanding of what it means to lead a congregation. None of them, in the community’s memory, treated the position of imam as an office to be occupied rather than a trust to be discharged. Each, in his or her own way, understood the khutbah, the classroom, and the counseling conversation as forms of amanah — trust extended by Allah and by the community, to be honored with humility, sincerity, and consistent presence. ISB’s imams have been, above all, shepherds: men and women charged with the care of a flock that includes the newly arrived immigrant, the lifelong convert, the restless teenager, and the elder nearing the end of a long journey of faith. That they have, across more than four decades and many changes of personnel, kept faith with that charge is itself one of the quieter achievements of this institution’s history.