Didn’t see this one coming, the new Imam in charge of the Ground Zero Mosque is Abdullah Adhami.

New York (AP) – The organization planning to build an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center said the imam who has been the public face of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, will be playing a reduced role in the facility.

The nonprofit group Park51 announced Friday that it had named a new imam to help lead religious programing so that Rauf could focus on other initiatives.

Rauf announced late this fall that he would be starting a global movement that would fight extremism and promote better relations between people of different faiths and cultures. He is set to start a national speaking tour Saturday in Detroit.

Rauf will remain on the Islamic center’s board, Park51 said in a statement, but the group needed someone who could be more focused on the day-to-day business of building a local congregation.

The group named another New York City imam, Abdullah Adhami, as its senior adviser.

Adhami was born in Washington, D.C., and earned an architecture degree from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He has already performed guest lectures at the site of the planned center, and has had a presence in lower Manhattan since the early 1990s.