Zabiha News

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Submitted by Zabiha News: “The principal of an Islamic boarding school on Buffalo’s East Side has been forced to resign after allegations that he was sexually involved with one of his students and that he claimed to have taken her as a second wife.

Evidence suggests Mohammed Ibrahim Memon, a father of seven, persuaded Sajidah Khan, then 21, to marry under Islamic law as a pretense to sleep with her.

Memon, an Islamic scholar and imam, has agreed to leave his post at Darul-Uloom Al-Madania, 182 Sobieski St., for a minimum of seven years. The private, Islamic secondary school and institute of higher learning is located alongside Masjid Zakariya mosque in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood. Memon also agreed to never teach in the girls school again if reinstated.

“We were betrayed,” said Chaudhary A. Khan of Woodbridge, Va., Sajidah’s father, who has sent four children to Madania.

“I want families to know these people are not following Islamic laws, they are not following American laws. They claim they are serving Islam, but they are just serving themselves,” he said.

Khan says Memon proposed to her at school in August 2006, and proclaimed within days he had married her himself, under Islamic law, with two witnesses present. He also told her to keep their marriage secret.

It was in her last year of study, Khan said, that Memon sought her out. Khan says he arranged a secret meeting on Aug. 30, 2006, in the locked basement of a heating room. Khan said the imam flirted with her, and she had to repel him when he tried to have physical contact.

That day marked the first time he talked of marriage, she said.

Until that day, Khan said, she could count the social contacts she had had with males on one hand.

“In our culture, we don’t even let girls sit with their male cousins, and this guy is a teacher. Why is this man, who has said we are not even allowed to chat with a boy, doing this?” she said.

“At the same time, I’m thinking, ‘He is a teacher, he is very famous, maybe he knows something I don’t know.’ ”

Khan said Memon was always concerned about covering his tracks so their relationship wouldn’t be detected, although Memon’s wife, Mariam, approved.

She was surprised to hear the educator make dismissive comments about the girls who studied at Madania, and “often said women were [on Earth] only to satisfy men.

The family’s decision to go public occurred after two prominent Pakistan imams, Mufti Rafi Usmani and Mufti Taqi Usmani, told Sajidah Khan’s brother, Ikram Haq, that the family had an obligation to speak up and inform other Muslims of what happened.”

A former Madania student, who wished to remain anonymous, also told The News she had a relationship with Memon several years ago as a student. Days after accepting his marriage proposal, she said, Memon told her he married them both in front of two witnesses she came to believe never existed.

Also, like Khan, the former student said Memon told her not to tell anyone. But she did, and soon her father removed her from the school. The woman no longer believes she was married to Memon, and is bitter toward the school and its teachings.

“When I talked to [the former student], we realized it was almost the same story for both of us,” Khan said.

Khan currently attends a community college in Virginia, and plans to marry, with her parents’ blessing, in October.

Meanwhile, Memon, author of “The Book of Purification,” denies being romantically involved with Khan. “As far as marriage and divorce, that has never been there. Not even Islamically, not even from the religious point of view,” Memon said.

Later, he said, “[Marriage] is just a term that we were using, but we were never considering it a marriage, really. Even she knows.”