Between immigrant Islam and black liberation: Young Muslims inherit global Muslim and African American legacies

Muslim World

Volumn 95, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 497-513

  Karim, Jamillah ^a  

^a SPELMAN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949543169     PISSN: 00274909     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-1913.2005.00108.x     Document Type: Review

References (41)

1. John L. Esposito and Yvonne Yazbeck Huddad, eds., Muslims on the Americanization Path?, (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998). This work does not represent a linear narrative of Muslim assimilation, but the editors' introductory essays highlight Muslims' "otherness" as a major catalyst shaping American Muslim identity
2. See Jamillah Karim, "Negotiating Race and Class in the American Ummah: African American and South Asian Muslim Women in Chicago and Atlanta" " (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2004) for relations between African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims, both vital groups in the "American ummah."
3. Statement by young man at 2002 WDM convention, 30 August 2002, Chicago
4. Nancy Foner, Ruben G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, "Immigration and Immigration Research in the United States," Items and Issues: Social Science Research Council 2, no. 1-2 (summer 2001): 2
5. Considered a heretical group by most Muslims, the Ahmadis originated in Ludhiana, India in 1889 when Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (b.1835) proclaimed himself the messiah, receiving revelations from God to reform the world. Linda S. Walbridge and Fatimah Haneef, "Inter-Ethnic Relations within the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the United States," in The Expanding Landscape: South Asians and the Diaspora, ed. Carla Petievich (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999), 125
6. Also see Richard Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997)
7. C. Eric Lincoln, pioneer authority on the Nation of Islam, discusses the timing of W. D. Fard's appearance in the 1930s, the period of both the Great Depression and the Great Migration, as it relates to the Nation of Islam's early success among the less privileged. C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc., 1994), 11-15, 20-21
8. Imam W. D. Mohammed, "Modern Islamic Civilization." 2 February 1999, Chapel Hill, cassette. For various theories regarding the identity of Fard Muhammad, see Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 397-417
9. Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 50-54
10. Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition From Separatism to Islam, 1930-1980 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 106-107
11. and Turner, Islam, 163-166
12. Evanzz gives the most thorough account. The ethnic identity he ascribes to Fard Muhammad conforms to Imam W. D. Mohammed's description of him as South Asian. Fard's teachings reflect more than Ahmadiyya influence. Many believe that he organized a "master plan" incorporating "spiritual science, Islamic Studies, Jehovah Witness . . . , Bible Studies, Freemasonry, Ahmadiyyah, Shi'ah, Sūfī and Moorish Science Temple teachings . . . , beliefs from Father Divine, Booker T. Washington, David Walker and Carter G. Woodson." Imam Charles Zuberi Shabazz, Muslim Journal, 7 March 2003
13. After the Ahmadis arrived in the U.S., their teachings began to emphasize color: less frequently exposing what they considered theological errors in Christian doctrine than before, the modified Ahmadiyya teachings linked Christianity with "the oppression of people of color," persuading black Christians to claim an alternative faith. Walbridge and Haneef, "Inter-Ethnic Relations," 125
14. Dannin describes how corrupt Ahmadiyya leaders exploited their African American followers by raising membership dues so that immigrant leaders could make trips to India and Mecca. Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39. Dannin's is the most thorough work on early African American and immigrant encounters and tensions
15. "Pride becomes an issue," argues Sulayman Nyang, "because the immigrants are as a group economically better off than their native-born co-religionists. . . . The arrogance of many immigrants in projecting themselves as better informed Muslims simply by virtue of earlier exposure to Islam . . . has certainly created the feeling in the Muslim Afro-American community that many of the immigrants are unwilling to accept wholeheartedly Black Muslims." Sulayman S. Nyang, "The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Black Quest for Identity in the U.S.," in Elijah Muhammad and the Ideological Foundation of the Nation of Islam, ed. Adib Rashad (James Miller) (Newport News: U.B. &. U.S. Communications Systems, 1994), 255-256
16. For additional race and class analysis on relations between African American and immigrant Muslims, see Frederick Mathewson Denny, "The Umma in North America: Muslim 'Melting Pot' or Ethnic 'Mosaic'?" in Christian-Muslim Encounters, eds. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Zaidan Hadclad (Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, and Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 342-356
17. and Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
18. Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam, 67
19. For more on early African American Muslim groups, see R. M. Mukhtar Curtis, "Urban Muslims: The Formation of the Dar ul-Islam Movement," in Muslim Communities in North America, eds. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 51-73
20. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith, Mission to America: Five Islamic Sectarian Communities in North America (Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, and Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 1993)
21. Aminah Beverly McCloud, African American Islam (New York and London: Routledge, 1995)
22. Yusuf Nuruddin, "African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity: Between Traditional Islam, African Heritage, and the American Way," in Muslims on the Americanization Path?, eds. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 267-330
23. For a bibliography of African American Muslim publications, see Michael A. Koszegi and J. Gordon Melton, eds., Islam in North America: A Sourcebook (New York: Garland Pub., 1992), 192-207
24. Zafar Ishaq Ansari, "W. D. Muhammad: The Making of a 'Black Muslim' Leader," American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 2 (1985): 245-262
25. Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 99-118
26. Lawrence H. Mamiya, "From Black Muslim to Bilalian: The Evolution of a Movement," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21 (June 1982): 138-52
27. Marsh, From Black Muslims, 89-124
28. and Jane Smith, Islam in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 89-93
29. Nyang, Islam in the United States of America (Chicago: KAZI Publications, Inc., 1999), 147
30. In 1959 foreign Muslim diplomats authorized Elijah Muhammad's travel to the Middle East, including Mecca. Muhammad's exposure to Asian and Arab Muslims only intensified his mission. Upon his return to the U.S., he reported that Egyptian President Gamal Nasser wanted him to teach in Africa, offering him a lavish palace, but he declined the offer because " 'Allah would not approve my going out of the United States to teach anyone until these mentally dead black people in America had been given the knowledge of self and kind.' " Lincoln, The Black Muslimsa, 168
31. C. Eric Lincoln states, "While he may have wanted the legitimacy of orthodoxy, the possibility of his black nation losing its identity in the vast configurations of international Islam was not something he ever wanted to risk." Lincoln, The Black Muslims, 211
32. Also see Claude Clegg, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 133-134
33. Sulayman S. Nyang, "Convergence and Divergence in an Emergent Community: A Study of Challenges Facing U.S. Muslims," in The Muslims of America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (Oxford, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 238
34. Imam W. D. Mohammed began publicly opposing his father in 1964. He was reinstated in 1965 after the death of Malcolm X. Clegg thinks that Imam W. D. Mohammed's return was due to financial reasons, but he may have returned upon his father's insistence, to prevent from happening to him what happened to Malcolm X. Imam W. D. Mohammed was excommunicated and reinstated several times after 1965. See Clegg, An Original Man, 222-224, 231-232, and 245-246. However, Elijah Muhammad officially supported Imam W. D. Mohammed's teachings by 1974
35. Imam Mohammed stated, "I felt comfortable around them, but as I began to hear more and more of what they were saying, I began to feel uncomfortable because I could hear them responding to hurt, denial, rejection, and oppression that they blamed the West for. [Immigrant Muslims] know about the days of Muslim glory. They also know the setback that colonial domination caused in the Islamic life of Muslim society. [They are] still struggling to have their land in good shape, to have the opportunity to engage in the world economically and still be accepted. . . . They still feel rejected. So this is the burden left on the leadership of the Muslim world, and it causes the leadership to ignore the true light of Islam, the pure light of Islam. We are hoping for a time when we can kind of heal enough emotionally so that we can really see the pure light of this religion." Imam W. D. Mohammed, "Islam, Ethics, and Education," 30 April 1997, Washington, D.C., cassette
36. Imam W. D. Mohammed, Muslim. Journal, 28 November 1997
37. Many American Muslims, both immigrant and African American, disagree with W. D. Mohammed's nontraditional interpretations as they consider gender norms in his community to be a public display of women that clearly violates Islamic law. For more on immigrant responses to Imam W. D. Mohammed's thought, see Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 107-127
38. Two-thirds of mosques in the United States are dominated by one ethnic group, usually either African American or South Asian: Ihsan Bagby, Paul M. Perl, and Bryan T. Froehle, The Mosque in America: A NationalPortrait: A Report From the Mosque Study Project (Washington, D.C.: Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2001), 19
39. Interview, 3 May 2002, Chicago, tape recording
40. "The Great Debate," 30 August 2002, Chicago, tape recording
41. Imam W. D. Mohammed, Muslim Journal, 20 September 2002