 Results of 1st National Presentation Contest 
Salaamalaikum Brothers and Sisters
In order to develop a cadre of English speaking Zakirs the Board of Directors and the Board of Trustees of Muslim Congress asked volunteers from the Shia Youth around the country to participate our first national competition.
By the Grace of Allah we have completed the self building competition. This was based on the book "SelfBuilding (An Islamic guide for spiritual Migration towards God)" by Ayatollah Ibraheem Amini (online version of it is available here). This book was selected by the Board Of Trustees (Ulemas).
We would like to thank all the volunteers without whom this project could not have been done are ( Sis. Summer Syed FL, Br. Ali Abbas FL, Abbas Ali Rizvi FL, Mohsin Husein FL, Abbas Akbar FL, Mir Asghar MI, Sis. Ayla Akbar MI, Moosa Khan NJ, Haider Shah NJ [if we miss out anyone please forgive us] ). The put their time and energy to made Powerpoint slides based on this book (watch the slides here). This process took a few months of hard work. Thereafter the competition was opened to all. In the months of Moharram and Safar a number of people registered for the competition. A few volunteered to train speakers (we must not forget sister Zehra Abidi from Seattle who train a few participants) and most wished to speak. The registrants were mostly from USA, some from Canada, a few from Asia.
The month of Moharram and Safar was spent in weekly teleconferences conducted by the "speakers in training" who prepared their speech on a given chapter and delivered it in the teleconference. On an average 20-25 people attended the each teleconference ( a few are archived here )
Of those who completed this speaker training some gave speeches at various venues such as Islamic centers, Sunday schools, and Majalis at homes. Those who succeeded in recording their video in digital format submitted their videos. There were technical glitches in the video upload process that were subsequently overcome. Some of these were due to the fact that some videos were recorded in HD format increasing the file size to over 1Gb making them difficult to upload. For those who did signup in the program before the deadline and were facing technical difficulties we delayed the announcement of the results to accommodate and overcome their technical problems. These videos were judged by the Ulema of the Board of Trustees of Muslim Congress and a winner was picked from amongst them. The top 4 contestants in sequence are:
We congratulate the winners, their parents, friends, and Ulemas of their Islamic centers. The prizes (list is here) to the winners will be presented at our 5th Annual Conference on July 4-5, 2009 in Dearborn, Michigan at Hyatt Regency Hotel.
We are very excited and happy to share it with you that our youth are still sending us sign-up forms for the selfbuilding contest. We received 50 or more registrations for the program after the deadline. The good news is that this is just the very first contest we had. Our Ulemas are working on choosing the next book for our volunteers to start working on and open the next contest very soon. So stay tuned to here from us again.
Thank you
Self-Building team
Muslim Congress (selfbuilding@muslimcongress.org)
|
