August 17, 2007
Turkish Imams Seek Overtime Pay
(Istanbul, Turkey) It appears that the lure of a religious calling to Islam loses some of its luster when one is working 18 hours per day for poor pay. Therefore, the Muslim prayer leaders want to be paid overtime.
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Some 70,000 government-paid preachers rose at 4am to begin the daily call to prayer and did not finish until midnight, said Huseyin Demirci, the head of Diva-Sen, one of the smaller clerics' unions representing 2000 imams.At $760 per month, imams are the lowest paid government workers in Turkey. For that amount, imams also have to keep their mosques squeaky clean. As a result of low pay for long hours, many Muslims consider the job a poor career choice and a reported 6,000 mosques lack an imam.Turkish public servants were paid overtime for exceeding a normal five-day, 40-hour week but imams, also government workers, were excluded, Mr Demirci said. In Sunni Islam, imams lead prayers five times a day, starting at dawn and often finishing late at night.
Logically, with a union representing tens of thousands of imams, they should be able to go on strike and deny the believers their five-a-day sermons. Right?
All in all, though, it appears that the actual conflict is not between the imams and the government, rather it's between Islam and money.
Posted by: Mike Pechar at
05:18 AM
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