ISNA majlis shura meeting

Assalamu Alaikum,

Well, its finally over. We had the meeting yesterday for the releasing of funds for MYNA by ISNA. The good news is that they did release the funds. The bad news is that there was a heated discussion that lasted for one hour. Roughly, here is how it went down. Asad, please feel free to add on or correct.

Asad began the MYNA part of the meeting by making a presentation on Powerpoint. As soon as it was over, Bassam Osman had a question as to who the members of the Board of Advisors were and who appointed them. After giving a brief history of things since the last meeting, there was a retroactive motion by Altaf Hussain to accept the nomination of all the current members by ISNA. It passed.

Now ISNA has a budget for a youth Director for $50k. There was a big confusion of whether we were asking for this or the 40k that was ours to begin with. Dr. Sayeed tried to hijack the meeting (not my words but of someone who was there). He was basically saying that the Director should be hired and should work out of ISNA HQ. It got personal and Dr Sayeed became very upset and insisted that Director should be at HQ. We finally got the approval to use the funds, with a further evaluation due 10/2003

All were of the opinion that MYNA was a part of ISNA and the authority of the Board of Advisors should be from ISNA Majlis Shura. Because there was a confusion as to whether it was supposed to by this way or MYNA was like MSA, Shk. Nur appointed a committee to look into this matter. The members are: Bassam Osman, Kareem Irfan, Dr. Sayeed, and Monem Salam. The committee is supposed to meet and come up with the guidelines for the role of MYNA within ISNA.

I personally feel that there is a lot of distrust on the part of ISNA towards MYNA for whatever happened in the past. As such, my strong recommendation is that we leave the money with ISNA and continue to spend it as we need it. If we withdraw all the money, it will create further distrust. Plus, right now, I don’t think we are in a position to house this money.

Anyway, these are my thoughts. 2 things we have to do immediately:

Get the 2 Directors up and running
Figure out for ourselves the relationship between ISNA and MYNA and make a suggestion.

Take Care. Allah Hafiz
Monem