Although nearly one third of this country's 2.8-million Muslims are African-American, they remain a largely hidden — and separate — segment of the Muslim community.
Not long ago, I was watching the 25th-anniversary broadcast of Roots, and I got a small start every time Kunta Kinte referred to his god as Allah or prayed to the prophet Mohammed. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the fact is, at least a third of the slaves brought to this country from Africa were practicing Muslims (which is why some African-American Muslims refer to themselves not as converts but as "reverts"). Of course, very few stayed Muslim for very long. Slave owners had a marked preference for their own brand of religion, and Islam's first entrance into America died on the vine. That might explain why many Americans don't generally think of an African-American when they picture a Muslim, even though nearly a third of the estimated 2.8-million Muslims in this country are black. True, not long ago, Louis Farrakhan would have been the first face most Americans attached to the word "Muslim." But Farrakhan has always been associated in the popular mind more with black nationalism and occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism and race baiting. The religious pretext of his organization, the Nation of Islam (NOI), has always been considered suspect at best, and for most Americans the face of Islam, now more than ever, is gaunt, bearded and Arabic.
All things considered, being this country's forgotten Muslims might not seem like such a bad thing right now. In the weeks after Sept. 11, some people openly wondered if blacks in the U.S. weren't happy that someone else, at last, was going to be America's punching bag. The supposition was profoundly cynical, of course, since it assumed that racism is a kind of hot potato that one stigmatized group can pass on to the next with a collective sigh of relief. Beyond that, though, it skipped over an obvious point. A lot of African-Americans are Muslims. The fact that they would have to insist on that point is a reminder that the American Muslim community isn't just diverse, it's haunted by rumors of a racial divide.
For years, some members of the African-American Muslim community have complained about having to live in the shadow of the immigrant (largely South Asian and Arabic) Muslim community, or worse, being treated dismissively by it. Wallace D. Mohammed is leader of the Muslim American Society, the largest orthodox African-American Muslim organization in the U.S. In his view, the problem is not large enough to constitute an actual rift between African-American Muslims and their immigrant brethren. "My experience," he wrote in response to faxed interview questions, "is that race relations are good and bad, depending on people individually."
For many African-American Muslims, however, that view soft-pedals a persistent problem that goes beyond individual prejudice. Even before Sept. 11, for example, Askia Muhammad, a writer with the Pacific News Service, wrote, "As someone who has been both close to and removed from the Nation of Islam, I know that not just Black Muslims (i.e., NOI followers), but all those Muslims in America who are not native Arabic speakers, are stigmatized. …Whether affiliated with Farrakhan or not, their belief and their practice are thought to be less "authentic' than those of those born in Islamic societies abroad."
For many, the hope was that Sept. 11 would change this dynamic. With the American Muslim community under intense pressure and reportedly undergoing a period of introspection and self-evaluation, it seemed natural that African-American Muslims would be looked to as a source of hard-bought strength and wisdom. The frustration of these hopes led Bilal Ibn Muhammad, director of the All Muslims' Islamic Communications Center in San Jose, to declare to the Pacific News Service, "As much as I hate to say it, it comes down to race. Immigrant Muslims look down on us. They think we do not know enough about Islam."
Not all African-American Muslims are agitating for a special role in America's Islamic community. Dawud El-Amin, the leader of a mostly immigrant Muslim mosque in Winter Haven, says, "I'm not hung up on leadership. I just want to be a good Muslim. I mean, I am the imam (elected leader) but I have less knowledge than a lot of the people I'm over. I use their knowledge for the betterment of the community and they accept me as their leader. But if someone comes along who is better qualified, and we think that is the person to take this community further, then that's who I want to be the leader."
Like many American-born Muslims, El-Amin's introduction to the religion came via the Nation of Islam and eventually carried him ("like Malcolm X," he says) into the Muslim mainstream. Either despite that history or because of it, El-Amin downplays rumors of a racial division in America's Muslim community. "Sure, there are problems, but not a lot," he says. "I know I visit a lot of masjids (mosques), and I'm always treated as a Muslim." He is somewhat blase about complaints that immigrant Muslims treat African-American Muslims condescendingly. "Oh, yeah," he says, "because I don't know Koranic Arabic, some of them think I don't really know the religion. But I chalk it up to ignorance more than prejudice."
Abdul Ali, a member of an African-American Muslim community in St. Petersburg with direct ties to Wallace D. Mohammed's Muslim American Society, is prickly about complaints that African-American Muslims receive short shrift. "We have different cultural traditions and identities," he says, "but we are all Muslims."
If there ever was a racial divide, he suggests, it was undoubtedly the residue of what he calls the "incorrect" way that the Nation of Islam first introduced the religion to the African-American community. For him, as for El-Amin, the NOI has always been about Black Nationalism first and Islam only second. It wasn't until 1975, when Wallace D. Mohammed broke with the NOI his father had once led and adopted mainstream Sunnism that an immigrant Muslim was likely to encounter an African-American Muslim whose faith was recognizably orthodox — and, that being the case, Ali says, doubts about the authenticity of African-American Muslims' faith were inevitable.
"Besides," Ali adds, "a lot of Muslims felt that the U.S. was so corrupted, Islam would never be established here correctly." In other words, any ill will African-Americans sensed was simply part and parcel of the hostility many non-American Muslims felt toward this country as a whole.
Ali's Islamic trajectory, like El-Amin's, began in the hothouse environs of the Nation of Islam and has long since taken him to a place that's far less radicalized. One suspects, in fact, that the further people move from the Nation of Islam, the less likely they are to feel marginalized by the wider Muslim community, and the reason they probably feel less marginalized is simply because they have left the margin behind. (Supporters' estimates of the NOI's membership range as high as 100,000 while detractors typically put the number at only 20,000.)
Dr. Trevor Purcell, Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of South Florida, said it is dangerous to attribute a homogenous view of African-American Muslims to the wider Muslim community. However, he said: "There has been, indeed, some skepticism toward those associated with the NOI, particularly with respect to the legacy of the now-discarded doctrine of black superiority. (But) the wider Muslim community understands blacks' past association with the NOI and is able to look beyond it." What's more, said Dr. Purcell, Palestinian Muslims are inclined to identify with American blacks as oppressed people, "and that identification has only been strengthened by the events of Sept. 11."
Focusing too much on the NOI produces its own distortions. The immigrant and African-American Muslim communities have differences that go beyond the merely doctrinal. While African-American Muslims tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, for example, many conservatives regard immigrant Muslims as "natural conservatives," and have begun courting them accordingly. The effort is starting to pay off. For example, in the 1996 election, Muslims backed Bill Clinton over Bob Dole by a 3-to-1 margin; however, the numbers virtually reversed in the last election, with approximately 70 percent of Muslims nationwide casting their vote for Bush.
Florida Muslims more than followed suit. According to the Web site of the American Muslim Alliance, 60,000 of Florida's 100,000 Muslims (at least half of whom live along the I-4 corridor) voted in the last presidential election — and according to the organization's exclusive poll, 91 percent of those voted for Bush. (Ironically, Bush won the votes of many immigrant Muslims by campaigning against the use of secret evidence in deportation proceedings.)
Trying to find an African-American mosque in the Tampa Bay area is difficult. You won't find it without the help of someone who's been there. Unlike the immigrant Muslim community, the African-American community has no physical mosque it can call its own. This relative invisibility is often mirrored on the Web sites of major Muslim organizations, where African-Americans show up on pie charts portraying the community's ethnic diversity, or in articles about African-American Muslims such as Jamil Al-Amin who are in the news, but the link pages on the Web sites often fail to include, for example, an URL for Imam Mohammed's Muslim American Society.
The integration of the American Muslim community, clearly, is incomplete, as is the integration of so many communities in this country. And just as clearly, some African-Americans Muslims are unhappy about it. But not all. It doesn't seem to detract from Dawud El-Amin's experience as a Muslim. When asked what it's like to be an African-American Muslim, he seemed taken aback by the question. "As an African-American Muslim, I feel," he said, and then paused just long enough to give the final monosyllable special emphasis — "blessed."
This article appears in May 15-21, 2002.