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.

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.

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.

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.

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.