Voices of Islam (245 page)

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Aminah Beverly McCloud

Everywhere in America, especially since September 11, 2001, eyes have been focused on Islam and Muslims in the United States. Those ‘‘eyes’’ have also been trained to see Islam as a religion ‘‘over there’’ and its adherents, immi- grants and their children, as its representatives. Political pundits, journalists, members of the press and Congress, teachers, and heads of corporations— almost every courier of information—understand that Islam is a Middle Eastern religion that threatens America and that immigrants have brought a toxin to American shores. African American Muslims are not a part of this conversation. In response to media claims about Islam and Muslims, many immigrant Muslims and their children deny the assertions of violence but embrace the claim of ownership of American Islam. African American Muslims have not been invited to this conversation either. An astute observer might surmise that there are two—an American Islam in process and a Muslim-world Islam in reformation on American soil.

That signifi numbers of black Americans could believe in and be fi committed to a religious worldview other than the tradition of Christianity that was forced on them is still hard to fathom for many non- Muslims. As a result of this incredulity, everything about Islam in the black community has been reduced to a protest against racism in one form or another. There are even black historians of black American religious history who state in the twenty-fi st century that they have little if any knowledge of either black Judaism or Islam. This is incredible but true. The black American Muslim experience continues to be one of a quest for ownership of Islam. This process can be seen in many ways and with several ideological stances. However it is understood, it must be made clear that each position/stance furthers the process toward ownership and is honorable and legitimate. This is critical to any understanding of the black Muslim experience. Readers may have noted that I continue to use ‘‘black’’ rather

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than African American. Here I am not taking a stand in the name game played on Americans of African descent, rather I am making one small attempt to undo the denigration done after a scholar, C. Eric Lincoln, named members of the Nation of Islam by their color rather than their commit- ment.
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While Lincoln’s naming was innocent, it opened the door for many researchers to assert that the adjective ‘‘black’’ meant that this community was not really Muslim, and thus, every time Islam is mentioned in the community of blacks it is really not Islam but something else such as a protest movement. My choice is to bring voice to these communities of faith and sometimes of protest. However, faith comes first and protest is at best a handmaiden that helps erase the pejorative connotation when it is used.

Thus far, many researchers have overlooked the fact of one process follow- ing another in the overarching representation of black people. Until a couple of decades ago, texts on slave religion omitted almost any mention of Islam and African Muslim slaves. One could almost say that many of these texts tended to glorify the transition from an anonymous, quite generic African traditional religion to a blended Christianity. Researchers of Islam in America have cast commitments to Islam in black America as a either ‘‘protest’’ or ‘‘failed Christianity’’ rather than as an alternative religious experience. Black identity formation is still in process in the twenty-fi century. The depic- tions of black faith commitments in the Christian community should not be taken as normative, even though they have dominated for decades. Many minority cultures around the world face physical erasure. African American Muslims face an intellectual erasure of their history and thus the erasure of their contributions to what is quintessentially theirs, an American Islam.

A particular construction of African American Islam is in play today. I cannot put enough emphasis on the fact that this representation is that of an irrational, illogical ascription to an alternative epistemology as a way to protest American racism. This chapter makes no claims to deconstruct previous representations nor will it attempt to offer more than the skeleton of one potentially viable alternative for describing some of the components of this process. Stated another way, what is intended here is to present one potentially plausible description of the ideas of black Muslims in the process of coming to an ownership of Islam.

I want to look at the function of the discourses of the experiences of black Muslims in an environment in which power relations emerged from chattel slavery. In this story discursive practices are interwoven with social practices. We know that knowledge is governed by power relations, whether the context is slavery or religion. Any factual account of the African American Muslim experience must begin with the arrival of African Muslims kidnapped from their countries. While we must begin here, I am most interested in the possible retention of Islam and the possibility of a more direct link to Islam in the twentieth century. Because this is my concern, I am willing to give some credence to evidence provided of such links. I ask the

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reader to have patience with my position as it is only a suggestion of an alternate narrative.

THE AFRICAN MUSLIM EXPERIENCE OF THE NEW WORLD

Slavery was the common experience of Africans in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It was a journey from a condition of
sui juris
to chattel slavery in a space of warfare and capture, along with a journey of horror aboard slave ships, beginning a life in enduring struggle to retrieve and resurrect a stolen humanity out of loss. Information on African Muslim slaves is provided mainly by three researchers, Allan D. Austin, Sylvaine

A. Diouf, and Michael Gomez.
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All argue several points: (1) the number

of Muslims among the African slaves was signifi t—numbering in the thousands at least, (2) Muslim slaves were adamant about preserving their religion, (3) some aspects of slave life previously identified as emerging solely from African traditional religions mixing with Christianity are in fact heavily infl ed by Islam, (4) Islam itself was a major infl in the process of social stratifi ation within the larger African American society, (5) many of the particulars of Islam, including practices and language were lost over time.

Using these points of fact as markers, we can explore the contours of the experiences of African Muslim slaves, which were intimately tied to those of other African slaves on many levels but are also unique in many ways. African slaves knew slavery as a condition that could be manipulated or not, acquiesced to or not, and removed or not. American chattel slavery was a new kind of slavery in which not only were there no negotiations, but also there were religious justifications regarding skin color. American slaves were deliberately deprived of their heritage, their ability to maintain families, and the outward practice of their religion. This erasure of any claim to humanity gave birth to an ongoing restlessness in the black American community well into the twenty-first century. One significant theme of this restlessness is the segregation of Muslims from other parts of the African American community.

Islamic beliefs and practices, while nurturing the soul of the believer, also separate the individual from those who believe differently on some basic levels. But in the black American community this is a persistent tension as black families are multireligious. For example, modesty is a hallmark of Islam, and thus, the American model of providing few clothes for slaves was untenable for Muslim men who had to be covered from navel to knee. Their response was to wear multiple layers of clothing. Muslims also did not eat pork, the staple of the slave diet. This forced some creativity regarding diets that consisted of other meats such as birds and vegetables and strategic fasting. Prayer in Islam does not require much space or ceremony and is a

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solitary affair further separating Muslims from their companions in servitude. That these slaves were Muslim is a fact affirmed by the presence of Islam in the regions of their origins.
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Simultaneous to the period of the transatlantic slave trade (sixteenth- early twentieth centuries) was a period of the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. Wolof, Mandinka, Sereer, and Fula from Senegambia; Temne, Mende, and Kissi from upper Gambia; and Bights were some of the better- known tribes whose members were kidnapped or sold into slavery. These tribes comprised most of the African Muslim slaves, but not all of them. Many were schooled in Islam and Arabic as shown in Austin’s book, which is a collection of Muslim slave autobiographies.
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These narratives not only demonstrate literacy but also reveal previous intellectual work. Some of these slaves had been Qur’anic teachers and leaders in their communities. Perhaps here we need to make a note of slavery in the Islamic understanding before engaging in a discussion of the presence of Muslims in antebellum America.

Slavery, in all of its varieties, was defi a known entity before the coming of Islam and most concretely in Qur’anic references to the subject. The Qur’an presumes the existence of slavery and urges manumission and decent treatment. It does not ascribe slavery to the category of God- ascribed inferiority nor does it assign the condition to either the race or the color of a person’s skin. Muslim history in various regions bears witness to slavery as a condition that emerges as a result of war, famine, and kidnapping. Yet, slaves could work off their enslavement, have their families buy them out of the situation, or, of course, just remain slaves for generations, as occurred in Mauritania. Slavery in the old world was not designed to strip people of their essence as human beings. This is the understanding of slavery that African Muslim slaves brought with them on the transatlantic passage. Some of the autobiographies that Austin provides attest to this understand- ing.
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Additionally, other slaves were aware of the Muslim presence. Gomez asserts: ‘‘
...
many West Africans practicing indigenous religions were none- theless familiar with and influenced by Islam, having been exposed to Muslim dress, dietary laws, and overall conduct.’’
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Some evidence of Muslims in the slave population is found in runaway slave notices.

For example, New Orleans’
Moniteur de la Louisiane
called for the return of a runaway from the Hausa nation (‘‘nation Aoussa’’) in October, 1807. The next month, an auction by Patton and Mossy featured four men and six women ‘‘from the Congo, Mandinga, and Hausa nations, in the country eight months, from 11 to 22 years of age.’’
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Interestingly, these researchers (Gomez, Diouf, and Austin) present a challenge to the history that most of us have learned.
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In many schools, when slavery is taught at all, it is said that slavery totally abolished tribal

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connections and that slave masters were clever enough to separate tribal members from each other. Gomez asserts that ‘‘the Anglophone slavehold- ing society regularly distinguished between the various ethnicities within the African community.’’
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These distinctions are seen in runaway notices and further in the retention of original names. Many Muslim slaves apparently managed to keep portions of their names, which though anglicized are recognizable—Bullaly (Bilali), Bocarrey (Bukhari), or Moosa. The evidence produced by these scholars points to an oversight that results in a partial erasure of our knowledge of this population of slaves. Though there is much speculation about possible reasons for the oversight, the end result is confusion about the reemergence of Muslim communities in the twentieth century.

There are also signifi data on the active presence of African Muslim slaves through the 1930s from the Works Progress Administration. This group was commissioned to interview ex-slaves and their families. What they discovered was the retention of many of the basics of Islamic practice such as (the possession of) prayer rugs, prayer beads, veiling, head coverings, Qur’ans, knowledge of dietary laws, and ritualized daily prayer. This treasure trove of retentions provides a reasonable backdrop for black Muslim communities in the twentieth century. African Muslim slaves brought Islam to America and though names and rituals were sometimes lost, Islam as a worldview was not. The separation of Muslims from others and their practices is a theme that runs throughout the presence of Islam in America along with Arabic naming and ritual practices.

BLACK AMERICAN ISLAM

The ‘‘lost-found nation’’ of Muslims is in many ways an apt description of much of the experience of black Americans who transition to Islam. In many ways, the experience of black American Muslims in the United States fits this label that Elijah Muhammad assigned to his followers in the Nation of Islam. Histories of black American Islam usually begin by categorizing black Muslim communities as ‘‘failed Christian communities’’ whose major focus is Black Nationalism or that these communities concocted something called Islam out of disenchantment with Christianity. Either version attempts to erase any legitimate claim to Islam by labeling it ‘‘black.’’ Yet despite the lack of historical references until relatively recently, urban rumor has for almost a century carried tales of African Muslim slaves, voluminous slave retentions of Islamic customs, and a much more varied history than that found in African American history texts.
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Due to omission (and perhaps commission on the part of some) the story of Islam in black America has rarely been presented as standing on its own. Instead, researchers have painted a picture of ‘‘racial hatred,’’ seedy characters, and intrigue and have expressed incredulity at