By Imran Hassan

Sh. Khalid Yasin, who has dedicated more than 15 years removing misconceptions about Islam and Muslims, visited the greater Kansas City area for a three day whirlwind tour filled with lectures and workshops organized by the Islamic Circle of North America – Kansas City chapter (ICNA-KC).

The Kansas City chapter is involved in Da’wah booths, Billboard ads, Radio ads and Presentations. It provides support in welcoming, educating, guiding and stabilizing new Muslims through the KC New Muslims Care Program. It brings together the Muslim brothers and sisters in the community by organizing marriage workshops, parenting workshops, speaker of the month events, picnics and lectures It also has taken up a new role of providing relief to the local society through the ICNA-KC Relief chapter.

Sh Khalid Yasin started the tour with a Khutbah at the Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City (ISGKC) Masjid on Friday followed by a lecture, “The Challenges facing the Muslim family and community in America” after Maghrib prayer at the Masjid. The attendance exceeded all expectations with about 350 people for the lecture. The Sheikh stressed on the importance of the Muslim community in the west and how to safeguard themselves against the social evils that the western world offers to Muslims especially our youth. He introduced alternatives to the Television channels, Facebook and Google by introducing Purpose TV, www.challengeyoursoul.com, a portal that provides unlimited knowledge for the Muslim youth, through its vast archives of Islamic material from various scholars and www.AlWahy.com, an alternate search engine for Google that filters out the content unfit for our Muslim community.

The second event was a workshop on Da’wah. The Sheikh informed that the material for this workshop was an abridged version from a workshop that lasted 30 hours. The workshop dealt with preparing the Muslim community for Da’wah by stressing the need for Da’wah. He went into details of the characteristics of a Da’ee and how he should prepare himself to do Da’wah. He described the Da’wah process as a 1, 2, 3 step process of Fiqh (understanding), Manhaj (methodology) and Usloob (Techniques) of Da’wah.

The third event was a lecture directed to the non-muslims of our community held at the Islamic Center of Johnson County (ICJC) Masjid in Overland Park. As has been the norm with all his lectures, the Masjid again was overflowing with around 150 people. The theme of the topic was about Islam and America and how the real enemies of the USA are greed and lust and not the Islamic world. He strongly condemned the Muslim criminals carrying out attacks against the innocent people and stressed that the Muslims were being branded as terrorists only from 1948, with the start of the Israel – Palestine conflict.

The fourth event was a lecture for the Muslim youth titled, “Shaping the future of young Muslims in America”. The audience, about 150 of them, included youth as well as adults. The most appealing feature of all the lectures has been the Sheikh’s unique tone and vibrant energy with which he conveyed the message across to his audience. He dealt with very important but comfortably ignored issues that he called “Too Hot to Handle”. He talked about the physiological and psychological levels of the children starting from age 10 to 18. Some of the issues that he talked about were Marriage, Birth control, Homosexuality and private activities of young teenagers. He stressed on the importance of these topics and summed it up by telling the parents to “Either you talk to your children about these or someone else will”.

The 5th and final event was focused towards the women in our community. The topic was “Critical issues facing Muslim women & responsibilities of Muslim Women in Islam”, which was held at Islamic Center of Kansas (ICK) Masjid in Olathe after the Maghrib prayer. The Sheikh stressed on the important role of Women being the nucleus of the family and the community and thereby contributing to the growth of a strong country. Inspiration to achieve their goals were drawn not only from Muslim sources like Khadija, RA, the mother of the Muslimeen, Aisha, RA to Ingrid Mattson, the current President of ISNA but even from non-Muslim sources like Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama.

ICNA-KC, ISGKC, ICJC, ICK and all the people who worked hard for this event thank Allah (swt) and then the community for turning out in huge numbers and making this event a grand success.