Voices of Islam (240 page)

The most vivid and compelling accounts of the Hajj, however, come from the voices of Muslims privileged to experience the Hajj fi In the American context, Malcolm X’s (d. 1965) famous ‘‘Letter from Mecca’’ stands as the most acclaimed account. ‘‘Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all other prophets of the Holy Scriptures,’’ Malcolm X wrote at the conclusion of his pilgrimage. ‘‘There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue eyed blonds to black skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same rituals, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experi- ences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.’’
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Many others have written of the Hajj’s display of universal brotherhood; however, Malcolm’s account is exceptionally priceless because of his legen- dary role in the struggle against antiblack racism. On the platform of Black Muslim nationalism, Malcolm X tore down white supremacy with his intensely brilliant words and emerged as a hero for African Americans. The Hajj, the quintessential symbol of Malcolm’s move from the NOI (Nation of Islam) to Sunni Islam, made him a universal Muslim hero beyond black America. However, his account of the Hajj’s racial harmony reverberates so powerfully because of what he stood for in black America: a defiant spokesman against white racism and a sincere fighter for racial justice.

RACE AND AMERICAN ISLAM

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
emerges as a common theme in the con- version stories of many American Muslims, Black, Anglo, and Latino. The prominence of Malcolm’s Hajj narrative highlights race as a striking feature of American Islam—American Islam understood as one of multiple

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cultural expressions of Islam. Theorizing this multiplicity, Hodgson argues that cultural traditions and dialogues within specifi contexts determine Islam’s cultural relevance: only as Islam engaged already existing cultural dia- logues could it ‘‘become significant for cultural life at large.’’ Islam’s cultural relevance, and therefore its cultural expression, was as distinct as the cultures to which Islam spread. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Islam came to be associated with literacy. Through the study of the Qur’an and other Islamic literatures, Muslim Africans became the first literate class in an otherwise oral civilization. Even non-Muslims attended the Qur’an schools in West Africa because ‘‘they were the only educational structures available.’’
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Similarly, in southern Spain, Islam came to be associated with higher learning, cultural prestige, and lyrical eloquence, primarily through the transmission of Arabic texts, ‘‘from the poetical to the philosophical.’’
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The semantic richness of Arabic allowed Christians to express what they could not express in Latin and inspired Jews to revive their sacred language and express what they had never expressed before in Hebrew. In contrast, as Islam spread in the eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent along the Bay of Bengal, it came to be associated less with intellectual prosperity than with agricultural prosperity, particularly rice cultivation. There, the rural masses came to identify with Islam through the landholders, primarily religious gentry who were authorized by the ruling Muslims. The landholders established mosques at the center of thriving agrarian-based communities, making Islam a familiar part of a ‘‘single Bengali folk-culture.’’
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Islam’s relevance and social appeal were manifested in distinct ways. In many societies, race and social equality were not central to the cultural dialogue.
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In the American context, however, race assumed a central place in the cultural dialogue, and, as demonstrated in the converts’ common reference to Malcolm X, Islam has significantly addressed this cultural issue. Islam’s concern with issues of race represents a critical aspect in conceptualiz- ing a distinctly American Islam. The NOI, in which Malcolm X was a member for 12 years, played an exceptional role in this regard as it projected Islam as a religion that resisted racism. The NOI made its mission to address racial injustice very clear: it taught that Islam was ‘‘the Black Man’s’’
original
religion, and by accepting the religion, blacks were reclaiming their true, dignifi identity. With this message, the Nation of Islam unapologetically challenged racist ideologies intent on establishing blacks as an inferior race.

While the Nation’s theological position distinguished it from mainstream Islam, it was responsible for introducing Islam to African Americans, and did so ‘‘almost single-handedly.’’
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The NOI popularized Islam and gave American Muslims substantial cultural capital, primarily in African American communities. American Muslims acquire cultural capital to the extent that they compellingly present Islam as a cultural asset. American Muslim spokespersons increasingly speak to this challenge. Foremost among them is Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, an Anglo convert admired by his supporters for

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his credentials both as an American-trained academic and as a scholar of traditional Islamic sciences. In a 2002 lecture in Chicago, Dr. Abd-Allah challenged his majority second-generation American Muslim audience to make themselves ‘‘known [in America] and
...
to make friends [in America].’’ American Muslims possess an array of ‘‘treasures and knowledge’’ that can together produce ‘‘a creative [Muslim] minority,’’ standing for ‘‘justice, equality and good.’’ If ‘‘we bring together the best of what is here [in American society] and the best of what we [American Muslims] have, we can create something beautiful.’’
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Offering ‘‘something beautiful’’ to American culture, Dr. Abd-Allah speaks about the possibility of American Muslims furthering their cultural capital. ‘‘We must make Islam a home and open doors for the black and the white and the Hispanic and the Native American,’’ he states.
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His focus on native populations, rather than African, Arab, or Asian immigrants, brings home his message of, ‘‘What can Islam do for Americans?’’ Often he refers to the way in which African American Muslims have already laid the foundations in this regard. Another important spokesperson, Dr. Sherman A. (Abd al- Hakim) Jackson, lectures specifi about the cultural contribution of the NOI. An African American convert popular among second-generation American Muslims, also trained in both academia and traditional Muslim discourse, Jackson authored the groundbreaking work
Islam and the Blackamerican.
In it, he refers to how Black Muslims created in their larger black communities awareness of the effects of pork consumption and also inspired ‘‘the spread of Arabic names.’’
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Both are examples of Islam offering something beneficial to non-Muslim Americans.

THE IMMIGRANT DIFFERENCE

Because ethnic diversity and racial harmony are valued as American ideals, the ability for Muslims to substantially challenge and remove racial inequal- ities would function as an invaluable source of cultural capital. How can American Muslims capitalize upon the legacies of the Nation and Malcolm X, furthering the link between Islam and black empowerment, on the one hand, and that between Islam and racial harmony, on the other? American Muslim communities would have to demonstrate these ideals in their own communities first. The demographics of the American Umma—its significant African American population (at least one-third) and its ethnic diversity— make these ideals appear reachable.
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But the reality is that race-class (and also ideological) divides limit racial harmony in the American Umma. Interestingly, in the American Umma, the most pronounced lines run not between black and white but between black and immigrant.

The immigrant difference broadens the problem of race in the American Umma, and in ways that Malcolm X did not fully anticipate when he

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proclaimed that ‘‘Islam is the one religion that will erase the race problem in America.’’ Tellingly if we look back at his ‘‘Letter from Mecca,’’ his focus is on black–white relations, and aptly so. When he refers to his
white
‘‘fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white,’’ he states that ‘‘their belief in one God had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, the ‘white’ from their behavior, and the ‘white’ from their attitude.’’ His thoughts then turn to ‘‘what is happening in America between black and white,’’ and he states, ‘‘I do believe, from the experience that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the hand- writing on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth— the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.’’
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Malcolm X could speak confidently about Islam as a model for American whites because he had yet to fully experience the ethnic divides in the Ameri- can Umma, at least not compellingly enough to acknowledge or speak about them in his autobiography. But these divides did exist as early as the 1930s, indicated by Sunni African American Muslims’ reports of negative experien- ces with their immigrant counterparts.
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In Malcolm’s case, however, his membership in the Nation of Islam restricted his relations with Muslim immigrants and as a result, limited his negative encounters with them. As it relates to future race relations in the American Umma, the issue of timing also explains Malcolm’s shortened scope. The year of Malcolm X’s death was also the year of the 1965 Immigration Act, which overturned a series of U.S. laws that limited Asian immigration. This act marked the largest infl of Muslim immigrants to the United States, particularly from the Indian subcontinent. Before this time, Muslim immigrants had yet to create the level of visibility that made ethnic divisions as obvious as they are today, particularly through the proliferation of ethnic mosques.
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Like Malcolm X, American Muslim leaders today speak about Islam as a model of diversity and racial equality; at the same time, however, they criti- cize American Muslims for their racism. Imam Zaid Shakir, a popular African American scholar who complements his traditional Islamic pedagogy with his expertise in political science, writes that American Muslims ‘‘have a unique opportunity to contribute to’’ ending racism, but ‘‘unfortunately, many Muslims have endorsed this disease through their refusal to acknowledge its existence or through their attitudes and actions toward their coreligionists of darker complexions.’’
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Here, Imam Zaid alludes to the black–immigrant divide. The historical black–white color line, which Malcolm X addressed, does matter in the American Umma; however, it functions differently in a context that combines African Americans and immigrants.

The immigrant presence in America draws attention to a continuum of privilege, not exclusively characterized by race—black versus white—but broadened to account for ‘‘an unspoken U.S. hierarchical social order’’
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in

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which whiteness, high income, and quality of education (which includes the ability to speak standard English) work together to locate ethnic groups and subgroups differently along a socioeconomic spectrum. This spectrum illustrates the persistence of the historical color line as it positions rich whites at the top and poor blacks at the bottom. At the same time, it accounts for how other ethnic groups become implicated in ‘‘the problem of the color- line’’
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as they attempt to position themselves closer to Anglos along the spectrum of white privilege: ‘‘Latinos join Asians and Native Americans as subgroups less privileged than Anglo Americans, though not as underprivi- leged as African Americans. It is this contest for middle ground that links both Latinos and Asian Americans in an ongoing struggle for recognition.’’
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Among the early Muslim immigrants were some who experienced what it

meant to be on the wrong side of the color line, particularly ‘‘those whose skin was darker than that of the average American.’’ In the South, they ‘‘found that they were treated as ‘colored’ by local populations and were refused access to public facilities reserved for ‘Whites only.’ ’’
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If we could imagine Jim Crow segregation making Arab and Asian immigrants ‘‘bitterly conscious, as [they] never had been before, of [their] brown skin and black hair,’’
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it would come as no surprise that some immigrants would position themselves so as to not be associated with blacks or with their experiences. Vijay Prashad exposes this form of social distancing among South Asian immigrants. ‘‘Desis realize they are not ‘white,’ but there is certainly a strong sense among most desis that they are not ‘black.’ In a racist society, it is hard to expect people to opt for the most despised category. Desis came to the United States and denied their ‘blackness’ at least partly out of a desire for class mobility (something, in the main, denied to blacks) and a sense that solidarity with blacks was tantamount to ending one’s dreams of being successful (that is, of being ‘white’).’’
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This type of social distancing from blacks—especially betrayed by residential patterns in which immigrants choose not to live in black neighbor- hoods—reflects a common pattern in black–immigrant relations in the larger society. How then would this common trend play out in the American Umma, a community marked as a subset not only of the universal Umma but also of the larger American society? In other words, what does it mean for South Asian and Arab immigrants to find, upon immigrating to the United States, that a substantial part of their new Umma is black? Have shared location in the American Umma created an awareness of the African American experience, support, and solidarity? For the most part, it has not. America’s race and class divides extend into the American Umma. Some African American Muslims even contend that the presence of immigrants in the shared Umma presents yet another venue for race discrimination toward African Americans. I present below the voices of Muslim leaders in Chicago as they speak about the way in which race and class inequalities become manifest in the American Umma. I feature Muslim voices as they urge the