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THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB) |
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THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB) |
For the last five years, Qaseem Uqdah, a Marine Corps veteran, has been visiting military bases around the world in search of Muslim officers and enlistees who might make suitable chaplains.
In his role as a recruiter, Uqdah is not employed by the military. Instead, he is a middleman who runs a group authorized by the Pentagon to nominate Muslim chaplain candidates. He is paid nothing for his efforts, he said, and is motivated by his belief in Islam.
One cleric Uqdah recommended -- Capt. James Yee, a Chinese-American convert to Islam and a graduate of West Point -- is now in a brig in South Carolina as government officials investigate whether he engaged in espionage while ministering to Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Neither military nor civilian authorities have brought formal charges, but the Pentagon says it has begun a review of the process it has used for years to select and train chaplains.
Whether the chaplains are Christian or Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist, the military relies on religious groups to recommend and to educate their candidates. The military says that because of the constitutional provisions that govern the division of church and state, only churches and religious organizations can ordain or appoint their own clergy.
With Muslims, however, this has been a problem because Islam, unlike most other faiths, has no centralized hierarchy.
"Because of the separation of church and state, and the decentralized nature of Islam, we are dependent on loosely affiliated Islamic groups to certify the credentials of Muslim clergy in order for them to apply to be chaplains in the military," the Pentagon said in a statement.
After more than 10 years of accepting the recommendations of Muslim groups, the military says it will now re-evaluate the requirements for individual chaplains and the religious groups that nominate chaplain candidates to the military.
The military says the review was not prompted by Yee's arrest. But there is no question the arrest brought the chaplaincy process under fresh scrutiny.