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"It took a while for the immigrant community to understand that our
community had actually evolved and moved on to Islam as it's practiced
around the world. And it took five to 10 years of W.D. Mohammed's leadership
to demonstrate that we were, quote unquote, legitimate Muslims," said Ayesha
Mustafaa, editor of Muslim Journal, a weekly newspaper affiliated with
Mohammed that has about 40,000 subscribers.
When Unity is Long Overdue
Arab and South Asian Muslims in the U.S. are discovering a slighted brother
in their fight for civil rights: Black Muslims.
By Omar Sacirbey
Many African-American Muslims can trace their Islamic heritage to slaves who
were brought to North America in the 17th century, some 10 percent to 30
percent of whom were estimated to be Muslim. They call themselves, as a
matter of pride, "indigenous Muslims."
Together, black Muslims account for about a quarter of the country's
estimated 5 million to 8 million Muslims, compared to the estimated 50
percent of U.S. Muslims who are from South Asian and Arab countries.
Despite their historic role within American Islam, many African-Americans
complain that Arab and South Asian Muslims who have immigrated since the
1960s have never taken them seriously as partners in the faith, show little
interest in cooperation and have marginalized their role in U.S. Islamic
institutions.
But that may be changing as South Asian and Arab Muslims who dominate
leadership positions in mosques and advocacy groups feel their civil rights
at risk after Sept. 11, 2001. Increasingly, they are turning to
African-American Muslims for their civil rights experience.
Cooperation between the two groups should come naturally, leaders say,
especially after Sept. 11, when many Muslims say they find themselves
enduring what black Americans--Muslim and non-Muslim--had endured for years:
job discrimination, profiling, hate crimes, violence and murder.
"There are an awful lot of places where our issues and interests converge
and on which we find ourselves working together," said Hilary Shelton,
federal and legislative affairs director for the NAACP, the venerable black
civil rights group.
Since Sept. 11, the NAACP has stepped up its cooperation with the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society and similar
groups, opposing provisions of the Patriot Act that they say infringe on
their civil liberties. The NAACP also condemned a secret program of
warrantless domestic surveillance that many believe has unfairly targeted
American Muslims.
Black Americans "went through the struggles of the civil rights era, and the
struggles before that," said Ahmad Al-Akhras, a native Palestinian who leads
the Ohio chapter of CAIR. "And we learned from leaders like Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King. They paved the way for people after them." Last
December, Al-Akhras was appointed to the executive committee of the Ohio
chapter of the NAACP.
Although slavery had nearly wiped out Islamic practices among blacks,
several black nationalists a century ago tied their movements to Islam. The
most prominent was Elijah Muhammad, whose Nation of Islam movement espoused
black redemption through Islam and black racial superiority. When Muhammad
died in 1975, his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, took over the Nation of Islam,
disavowed racist theology and moved his followers to a more mainstream
practice of Islam.
"It took a while for the immigrant community to understand that our
community had actually evolved and moved on to Islam as it's practiced
around the world. And it took five to 10 years of W.D. Mohammed's leadership
to demonstrate that we were, quote unquote, legitimate Muslims," said Ayesha
Mustafaa, editor of Muslim Journal, a weekly newspaper affiliated with
Mohammed that has about 40,000 subscribers.
Based in Chicago, Mohammed's ministry is known today as The Mosque Cares and
claims about 250,000 followers. Another 10,000 to 20,000 black Muslims
belong to the Nation of Islam, now led by Louis Farrakhan.
Most of the remaining 1 million to 2 million African-American Muslims are
not affiliated with either group, but they often complain about being
overshadowed by or mistaken for the more visible followers of Mohammed and
Farrakhan.
Mustafaa noted that many African-Americans can relate to Muslim concerns
about wiretaps and surveillance because Martin Luther King and other black
civil rights leaders were wiretapped.
For U.S. Muslim groups, the cooperation with black civil rights groups has
taught important lessons about forming alliances, working the media and
grass-roots organizing, Muslim leaders say.
"A group like CAIR that's only been around for 10 years can learn a lot
from a group like the NAACP," said Johari Abdul-Malik, a Brooklyn-born
convert, or "revert" as some prefer, who is now imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah
Islamic Center, near Washington, D.C.
"The African-American community is the veteran in facing those challenges.
They parallel what they faced in the '60s," said Kareem Shora, legal
director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which has a
significant Muslim constituency.
With their civil rights experience and knowledge of American society to
offer, more African-American Muslims are slowly filling leadership roles in
mosques and advocacy groups.
Abdul-Malik, who is also Muslim chaplain at Howard University, said he was
appointed imam at Dar Al-Hijrah, whose reputation had been "Arab-centric,"
in 2002 because of his American background and experience as an activist.
For the most part, his constituents have welcomed him, he said. "I have
people, even older immigrants, telling me, `Brother, we need you to be more
out in front, because our immigrant brothers don't have the experience,"' he
said.
Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom
Foundation, has also risen to prominence, in part for his oratory skills and
ability to crystallize common issues faced by blacks and American Muslims,
such as profiling.
"I get the double whammy," he's fond of saying, "driving while black and
flying while Muslim."
Other African-American Muslim converts in prominent positions include Siraj
Wahaj, a Brooklyn imam who in 1991 became the first Muslim to perform the
invocation for the U.S. House of Representatives and sits on the board of
directors of the Islamic Society of North America, one of the largest
Islamic organizations in the United States. CAIR also has at least one board
member and one state chapter president who are African-American Muslims, and
last year named a scholarship after civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
Despite these inroads, many African-American Muslims complain--and many
other Muslims acknowledge--that great divides remain, especially in
day-to-day contact between rank-and-file Muslims, and that the contact that
does exist is often superficial.
Many American Muslims see an embarrassing reminder of that divide every
Labor Day weekend in Rosemont, Ill., where the Islamic Society of North
America holds its annual convention that draws about 35,000 mostly South
Asian and Arab Muslims. A few miles away in downtown Chicago, thousands of
Warith Deen Mohammed's followers gather for their annual convention.
"They are only reaching out because they need help," said Aminah Beverly
McCloud, an Islamic studies professor at DePaul University in Chicago. She
believes today's Muslims don't have the same commitment to civil rights that
the African-Americans of the civil rights era had.
"They were Americans who felt so strongly about liberty and justice that
they were willing to give their lives for it. Black and white. That's not
the case with the immigrant community. They're here to make money," she
said.
Others believe many Muslims who are born into the faith don't take
African-American Muslims seriously, or don't associate with them because of
cultural prejudices.
"There needs to be some dialogue between us based on respect. But because
we're from America, we're reverts, a lot of people don't respect us as
Muslims," said Yusef Abdul-Jaleel, who is active with the Mosque of the
Islamic Brotherhood, founded in 1967 as a mainstream alternative to the
Nation of Islam.
"There needs to be more day-to-day interaction, something other than,
`Brother, can you speak here, we're having a fundraiser."'
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