How a boy band star from Boston became the beloved Imam Tay

I met Imam Tay, as Taymullah Abdur-Rahman is affectionately known, last year at an interfaith program at Auburn Theological Seminary. The thing he said that most resonated with me was that after his conversion to Islam, he was a Salafi for many years. Salafism attempts to get behind centuries of Islamic scholarship and prioritize the tradition’s earliest texts and practices. It encourages proselytizing. At its best, it encourages devotion. In some extreme cases, however, it can damage one’s soul and community.

I know this from experience. At age 22, I became convinced I needed to learn “pure Islam,” unadulterated by the Sufi practices I had been raised with. I started working at a K-12 Islamic school, where a parent alleged that my style of dress was haram (forbidden) because my shirts were not long enough. I started second-guessing whether I was sufficiently obedient and became anxious about what my disobedience might imply. Islam is meant to be a hopeful faith, but I became overly legalistic, convinced that one wrong act would condemn me to hell. There was no room for flexibility or nuance. It wasn’t until I met my husband, who reintroduced me to Sufism, that I began to realize how much being in that environment had warped my understanding of Islam.

Given my history, I was curious: How did Abdur-Rahman recover from Salafism? Given that background, what does his interfaith leadership look like? American Imam offers an almost unbelievable—though highly accessible—answer to these questions.