Voices of Islam (247 page)

However, the Ahmadiyyah Movement opened the world to its black members. Black Muslims ate, prayed, and studied with South Asian Muslims, and sometimes even married them. Many South Asians came to share the horrors of Jim Crow America even though a few claimed Aryan roots as recorded in immigration records. Readers should note that I am not postulating that Muslims in this leg of the tripod did not see Islam as a heritage. What I am saying is that the impetus of this stance is located in a Muslim-world Islam, which has little concern for that legacy.

Whereas the first leg was perhaps self-limiting because of its roots in slavery and new interpretation (to handling new circumstances or new information), the second leg’s cultural core demanded constant reinterpretation if only for

Islam in the African American Experience
79

the reason of immigration to a non-Muslim land. This reinterpretation, however, could only come from the original cultural core—South Asia but not from its
mawali
(clients)—blacks in the United States. Though blacks can admire the cultures of other Muslims, dress like them, and eat what they eat, each culture in the world that has embraced Islam has done so on its own terms. In this leg there is tension between different cultural needs—an almost irreconcilable dissonance. Muslim-world Islam has little, if any, real under- standing of the process of transitioning into Islam from another religious background. Immigrants hail from largely homogenous countries and few have members of other faiths in their families. More important, they did not have the basic, though profound, challenges of changing their worldview in a largely Christian land. There is little, if any, compassion for the tensions that arise from this lack of understanding and refusal to recognize cultural needs.

However, in addition to opening minds to the world outside of America, Muslim-world Islam also opened up the world inside the United States. Pre- cisely because this leg of Islam in America is not rooted in a slave legacy, it attracts whites. Thus, it permits on a limited basis, a rare shared experience between black and white Americans in pursuit of a different way of under- standing the world. The presence of this leg in the black community influen- ces not just the other two legs but also the black community in general.

Occupying this second leg of Islam in America, as mentioned previously, is psychologically precarious, as a signifi part of the new worldview is not easily accessible nor freely given. In the early twentieth century, learning Arabic was diffi especially for a black community struggling with English literacy. South Asian cultural norms that are presented as Islamic norms are signifi different from black community norms— women serve, men demand; the worldview has a well-defi hierarchy that is as much, if not more, Indian than it is Islamic. Most African American Muslims who have embraced this stance in the process of owning Islam have never achieved mastery of immigrant Islam. Thus, tensions persist and in many ways presage the existence of the third leg of the tripod.

The third leg of the tripod has as its core a notion of black participation in the creation of the world and its subsequent history. Many scholars have attributed this to a fanciful imagination or a piece of mental pathology directly related to slavery. I must admit that it is no more fanciful than the constructed myth of white superiority. Ownership of Islam in this leg usually begins with a creation story of a glorious and just black nation. This nation either created or encountered whites who in time came to enslave them.
19
The ideology of ownership is built around reclaiming those aspects of culture which lead to recreating a nation with Islam as its worldview. Rebuilding the family is also a priority but is not an end unto itself. Families are rebuilt as a necessity of nation building. Rather than the degradation of slavery, the myth

80
Voices of Change

of a glorious past is used as a catalyst for a viable present. The Nation of Islam is one model of this type of Islam.

This third leg is as critical to the process of owning Islam as the other two. Here the fight for freedom, justice, and equality is extended to critique the Umma (the world community of believers) and to continue a legacy of self-sufficiency in the attempt to further the process of ownership of Islam. Both Muslims and non-Muslims have refused to recognize this process and have tried unsuccessfully to relegate the cultural focus that sits at the core of this thought to the margins. I find this intriguing since the historical trajectory of this stance mimics so much in Muslim history.

Stories that are positive—fi with heroic deeds, compassionate efforts, gifted people, and loving families—are, as we all know, necessary for the psychological health of any community. Many of these stories are orally transmitted within communities. However, those communities that choose to develop into empires such as Rome and the United States, spread their stories beyond their normal boundaries to those they enslave, thus giving them a suprareality. It seems to me that modern scholarship, known for its lack of an
imaginaire,
has relegated the stories of non-Western peoples to legend—such stories can be entertaining but are defi itely without merit. Given this set of circumstances, the stories of subjected/enslaved people are portrayed as fanciful myths whose appearance renders anything and anyone associated with them illegitimate. Stories that challenge power are ridiculed as myth and black Muslims who plant their roots in this leg often have to deal with such ridicule.

I am using this metaphorical tripod as an attempt to provide an alternative entry into the African American Muslim experience. If we now look at the trajectory of this process in the latter half of the twentieth century, we can perhaps note some other, often omitted factors.

Black Muslims from the first and third legs were the fi Muslims on record who demanded pork-free diets in government spaces, in this case in the prison system in the 1950s. They also forced the recognition of Arabic and other unusual surnames such as Bey, El, and X in that same system. Black Muslims in the second and third legs brought Islam into the public school system in the early 1960s as they refused coeducational gym classes, refused to pledge allegiance to the flag, and demanded pork-free lunches for their children. These Muslims brought Islam into the professions around the same time that they joined the Civil Rights Movement and assisted in opening the door for the immigration of Muslim immigrants.
20
Muslims in the second leg were offered scholarships to study overseas in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Muslims in the first and second legs found their greatest challenges in the American black community which was continually under siege.

These challenges and tensions have only increased in the African American Muslim community and in the immigrant community. Rather than under- standing the process any culture embraces when becoming Muslim, many

Islam in the African American Experience
81

immigrants and most Americans have relegated black Islam to a corner labeled ‘‘antiwhite.’’ There is still at this point little ownership of Islam as many in the black community have either spent much of their effort retriev- ing Islam from its immigrant presentation or have given themselves over wholly to a cultural Islam. However, this is to be expected in a process that has existed in Islamic history in every culture from Morocco to China.
21

The African American Muslim experience is still very much in process although it is clearly an American religion. Islam will still be present in America, even if every immigrant takes his or her children back to the ancestral home. The events of September 11, 2001, mark another phase of the process just as did the events at the end of 1979 with the Iranian hostage crisis. Neither African American Christians nor Muslims are players on the world stage and, thus, are not consulted by their white brethren about any of the events of the world. This new phase, however, is beginning to mark a pulling away from the second immigrant leg. Muslims are also not joining the ranks of either the first or the third legs and thus probably are a lot closer in the process of gaining ownership of Islam. In this current phase, black Muslims are questioning not only the immigrant claim to superior Islamic knowledge but also the history of contemporary issues in the Muslim world and how that history relates to their own domestic concerns.

Black Muslims have long noted the presence of Arab Muslim liquor stores in their communities selling both liquor and illegal drugs to the community. They have also taken note of the hypocrisy of representation when on televi- sion they see immigrant Muslims smiling for the cameras with government representatives and others who they denigrate in Friday sermons. They real- ize that immigrant Muslims and their children have little investment in urban ghettos to which black Muslims are committed to change. The black Muslim family life is filled with Jews, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics from every part of the ideological spectrum. Some have sided with the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and have struggled simultane- ously with the racism of Palestinians toward black people. The limits of the immigrant capacity to embrace the pluralism or interreligious dialogue that black Muslims advocate is another challenge. The struggle for ownership continues.

This ownership will necessarily include white Muslims, Latino Muslims, immigrant Muslims and their children, but the power relationships will change. Muslim-world Islam will be vetoed by all and what will emerge will refl a fully Western Islamic expression. Those who fear giving up power will be ignored. The various legs of black American Islam and their primary concerns will syncretize into a dynamic expression of Islam that will display marks of the struggle for ownership.

The slave roots of American Islam will be recognized as will stories that relate the tales of conquest, and the extraordinary feats of heroes along with their tragedies. Hopefully, historians will provide more connections that

82
Voices of Change

strengthen the heritage of blacks in Islam, which will combine with the pres- ence of Muslims whose heritage comes from the Muslim world. We must all stay tuned for the next phase. The intent of this chapter was simply to present another lens from which to view a varied and rich process in the present.

NOTES

1. See C. Eric Lincoln,
   The Black Muslims of America,
   3rd ed. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994).
   

2. See Michael Gomez,
   Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
   (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Sylviane A. Diouf,
   Servants of Allah: Afri- can Muslims Enslaved in the Americas
   (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Allan D. Austin, ed.,
   African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook, Critical Studies on Black Life and Culture,
   vol. 5 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1983).
   

3. Playwright, Julie Dash portrayed this image well in her movie, ‘‘Daughters of the Dusk.’’ Celebrated fi Julie Dash came under the public’s eye in 1991 when her feature film ‘‘Daughters of the Dust’’ won for best cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival.
   

4. Austin,
   African Muslims in Antebellum America
   .
   

5. Ibid.
   

6. Gomez,
   Exchanging Our Country Marks,
   68.
   

7. Ibid.
   

8. See the film
   Amistad
   for a visual portrayal of some aspects of the journey and the deliberate efforts made by slaves to not forget who they were.
   

9. Gomez,
   Exchanging Our Country Marks,
   68.
   

10. See Adib Rashad’s
    The History of Islam and Black Nationalism in the Americas
    (Beltsville, Maryland: Writers’, Inc., 1991).
    

11. See James Oliver and Lois E. Horton,
    In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kimberly S. Hanger,
    Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803
    (Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press, 1997).
    

12. For accounts see:
    The Treaty of 1866 of the Five Civilized Tribes,
    Claudia Saunt’s
    Black White Indian: Race and The Unmaking of a Family;
    Tiya Miles’
    The Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
    ;
    Black Seminoles
    by Kenneth Wiggins; and
    Africans and Seminoles
    , by Daniel F. Littlefield.
    

13. Gomez,
    Exchanging Our Country Marks,
    81.
    

14. Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson,
    Juneteenth: A Novel
    (Vintage International, 2000); Angela Leeper,
    Juneteenth: A Day to Celebrate Freedom from Slavery
    (Enslow Publishers, 2004).
    

15. Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2003.
    ©
    1993–2002 Microsoft Corporation.
    

16. Michael Gomez,
    Black Cresent
    :
    The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas
    (Cambridge, 2005), 185–214.
    

    Islam in the African American Experience
    83
    

17. Ibid.
    

18. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton,
    Black Metropolis,
    vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1970), 174.
    

19. See Schuyler’s
    Black Empire
    as one example.
    

20. This statement does not negate the fact that the United States recruited signifi numbers of students and professionals from the Muslim world to fill jobs that Americans were not educated enough to fill in the numbers needed. It adds a perspective.
    

21. See Dru C. Gladney,
    Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic
    (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, U.K.: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Jamil M. Abun-Nasr,
    A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period
    (Cam- bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987).