WASHINGTON, April 27: An important exercise began in Washington on Friday to gauge the full impact of the Sept 11 attacks on the American Muslim community.

The occasion is the second national Imam conference of the American Muslim Council, an umbrella organization for several Muslim organizations.

This is the first such conference to be held after the September events and it will seek to get a feedback from mosque leaders about the problems created for Muslims here in the domestic hunt for Al Qaeda links. Some Muslim charities have been shut down or are being investigated for allegedly acting as a channel for financial aid to groups linked with Al Qaeda.

But the conference, which gets into stride on Saturday, will also hear from imams how the American Muslim community can become better integrated in the political system and start looking beyond the mosque. The conference is being attended by over 150 mosque and Islamic centre leaders, principals of Islamic schools and Muslim chaplains in US prisons and with the US military forces.