Over at the top-secret forums of RevivingIslam.com, where they prayed that Allah would allow my blood to spill over their hands, they don’t think very highly of Talaal Eid, the Boston imam who seems to have lost his job for being too moderate. Among his sins: he visited the Pope and prayed for Bush.
Okay this guy Talaal Eid, I have meet him on a few occasions. This guy is a hardcore modernist who went and visited the Pope and made du’a [prayed] for Bush and the military and against the Iraqi mujahideen [jihadists] during Eid last Ramadan. He went around telling the media that his masjid [mosque] had been hijacked by “Salafi” [“pure ones,” usually Wahhabis] extremists. I don’t know him well or anything like that, but I know many brothers that do. This guy is wacked out. He resigned as Imam, and than decided he wanted to still be Imam and is now making lots of trouble because the board won’t let him resign. (he is even threatening legal action).
As for being “beloved” from what I hear he was widely despised in Quincy and many people refused to even pray behind him and made a second juma’ah [Friday, i.e., the practice of going to the mosque to hear a sermon]. The Islamic Center of New England oversees two masajid [mosques]: one in Quincy and one in Sharon. I don’t really know the community in Quincy, but I do know the one in Sharon (as I regularly pray there). This brother Rajab Aboubakr that is mentioned, I hang out with his son as I do with the son of Imam Hafiz Masood in Sharon (whom Talaal and his cronies make out to be “extremists”).
The guy (Talaal) is widely hated in the area, despite how this article attempts to portray him. He is really arrogant as well and walks around with his al-Azhar turban (we all call it the suicide-turban) and he got his degree on Islamic studies from Harvard of all places. (My father-in-law said that getting an Islamic degree from Harvard is like getting a nuclear physics degree from Yemen).
So you can be sure if the Ikhwaanis [members of the Muslim Brotherhood] around here hate this guy (and are willing to make takfeer of him [i.e., consider him anathema]) that he is really messed up. Talaal and several other secularists have been recently making alot of trouble in the community. Some of the secularists had threatened to crash a fund raising even a few months back when Siraj Wahhaj came and are now accusing Imam Masood of immigration violations.