From African Slaves to Malcolm X
- From: Kayid Al-Kuffar <Kayedhom@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 06:20:21 -0700 (PDT)
Islam in America: From African Slaves to Malcolm X
Thomas A. Tweed
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
©National Humanities Center
When students think of Islam—if they do at all—they might summon an
image of Denzel Washington playing a stern and passionate Malcolm X in
Spike Lee's 1992 film, or maybe they imagine Louis Farrakhan on the
speaker's platform at the Million Man March in 1995. Some might have
encountered Middle Eastern Muslims on the nightly news, mostly as
"fundamentalists" and "terrorists." A few have met immigrant Muslims
in their neighborhood. Muslim students might be among their
classmates. But Muslims are more diverse than popular images allow,
and American Muslim history is longer than most might think, extending
back to the day that the first slave ship landed on Virginia's coast
in 1619. It encorporates two groups—Muslims from other countries who
migrated to America by force or by choice, and African Americans who
created Muslim sects in the twentieth century. Thus, a consideration
of the Islamic presence in America provides a new perspective on
several important (and familiar) issues that will be used to organize
this essay:
1. What is the history of slavery in the United States?
2. How have immigrants resisted and accommodated American culture?
3. What were African Americans' experiences in the northern cities
after the Great Migration?
4. How has African-American Islam addressed race relations since
the 1960s?
5. Is America a Christian nation?
At first, you will need to introduce Islam to your students, and a
helpful way to do this is to invite their responses to the word
"Muslim." What comes to mind when they hear the word? Write their
responses on the board without comment, and then use the list to
establish the dominant images of Muslims—for example, as militants,
extremists, newcomers. Then you can begin to contest these impressions
and establish that Islam is a diverse and long-standing American
religion—one that has had a significant presence in the United States.
At this point you will need to introduce the basic beliefs and
practices of the world's one billion Muslims, most of whom live in
Asia, not in the Middle East as most Americans presume. As in
Christianity and Judaism, Islam (which is second only to Christianity
in worldwide adherents) includes a number of communities or branches.
The two major groups are Sunni Muslims, who constitute about 85
percent of Muslims, and Shii (or Shiite) Muslims, who account for 15
percent of the world's Islamic population. All traditional groups are
represented among the five million Muslims in the United States, along
with some new movements that have been cultivated on American soil.
Despite their diversity, Muslims have a good deal in common. They
look to the Qu'ran— the sacred book that records the message of Allah
[God] as it was revealed to his final prophet, Muhammed (A.D. ca.
570-632), and they seek to follow the example (sunna) of the prophet.
All accept the Five Pillars of Islam, the basic beliefs and duties of
Muslims:
1. A profession of faith (shahada). All Muslims must proclaim
"There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet." Note here
that Muhammed is not God in Muslim theology but rather a spokesperson
or mouthpiece for the divine.
2. Prayer (salat). All Muslims pray five times daily while facing
the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
3. Alms (zakat). Faith also means outreach. To give thanks and
follow the example of Muhammed, Muslims with the economic means must
give alms to those who are less fortunate.
4. Fasting (sawm or siyam). Muslims who are physically able are to
fast from dawn to dusk during the ninth month (Ramadan) of the Islamic
calendar.
5. A pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. At least once in their lives, all
Muslims who are able must make a pilgrimage to the Great Mosque in the
holy city of Mecca, toward which they have knelt while praying five
times daily during their lives. (Chapter seventeen of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X offers a vivid account of this pilgrimage,
which was life-transforming for him. It was on hajj, he recounts, that
he first glimpsed the possibility that people of different races could
get along.)
Slavery and Islam
A small but significant proportion of African slaves, some estimate 10
percent, were Muslim. You might tell the story of Omar Ibn Said (also
"Sayyid," ca. 1770-1864), who was born in Western Africa in the Muslim
state of Futa Toro (on the south bank of the Senegal River in present-
day Senegal). He was a Muslim scholar and trader who, for reasons
historians have not uncovered, found himself captive and enslaved.
After a six-week voyage, Omar arrived in Charleston, South Carolina,
in about 1807. About four years later, he was sold to James Owen of
North Carolina's Cape Fear region. In 1819 a white Protestant North
Carolinian wrote to Francis Scott Key, the composer of The Star
Spangled Banner, to request an Arabic translation of the Bible for
Omar, and apparently Key sent one. Historians dispute how much the
African Muslim leaned toward Christianity in his final years, but
Omar's notations on the Arabic bible, which offer praise to Allah,
suggest that he retained much of his Muslim identity, as did some
other first-generation slaves whose names have been lost to us.
(Omar's Arabic bible, which has recently been restored, is housed in
the library of Davidson College in North Carolina.)
Muslims and Immigration, 1878-1924
Most history courses cover the immigrants who changed America's
population throughout the nineteenth century. You might point out
these immigrants were not all European or Christian. Many were Chinese
and Japanese migrants who practiced Buddhism and other Asian
traditions. Thousands of Muslims came as well, and most of these first
Islamic immigrants were Arabs from what was then Greater Syria. These
Syrian, Jordanian, and Lebanese migrants were poorly educated laborers
who came seeking greater economic stability. Many returned,
disenchanted, to their homeland. Those who stayed suffered isolation,
although some managed to establish Islamic communities, often in
unlikely places. By 1920, Arab immigrants worshiped in a rented hall
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and they built a mosque of their own fifteen
years later. Lebanese-Syrian communities did the same in Ross, North
Dakota, and later in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Michigan City, Indiana.
Islam had come to America's heartland.
The first wave of Muslim immigration ended in 1924, when the Asian
Exclusion Act and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act allowed only a
trickle of "Asians," as Arabs were designated, to enter the nation.
African-American Islam in the Urban North
A Euro-American, Mohammed Alexander Webb (1847-1916), proclaimed
himself a Muslim at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in
1893, but converts have been more prominent among Americans of African
descent, especially those who followed the mass migrations of southern
blacks to northern cities beginning in the early decades of the
twentieth century. Noble Drew Ali established a Black nationalist
Islamic community, the Moorish Science Temple, in Newark, New Jersey
in 1913. After his death in 1929, one of the movement's factions found
itself drawn to the mysterious Wallace D. Fard, who appeared in
Detroit in 1930 preaching black nationalism and Islamic faith. Fard
founded the Nation of Islam there in the same year. After Fard's
unexplained disappearance in 1934, Elijah Muhammed (1897-1975) took
over, and he attracted disenchanted and poor African Americans from
the urban north. They converted for a variety of reasons, but, for
some, the poverty and racism in those cities made the Nation of
Islam's message about "white devils" (and "black superiority")
plausible.
Race Relations since the 1960s
Elijah Muhammed won an important convert when Malcolm Little
(1925-1965) joined the faith in a prison cell. Malcolm X, the name he
took to signal his lost African heritage, became a public figure
during the 1960s, although he separated himself from the Nation of
Islam before his death. After Elijah Muhammed's death in 1975, the
movement split. One branch, under the leadership of the fifth son of
Elijah Muhammed, moved closer to the beliefs and practices of Islam as
it is practiced in most of the world. This group, which would later
change its name to the American Muslim Mission, is the largest African-
American Islamic movement. The much smaller Nation of Islam, which the
American Muslim Mission and other Islamic groups condemn as racist and
unorthodox, is much more familiar to most Americans. Many American
Muslims would claim that the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan,
is not representative of either immigrant or convert Islam in the
United States.
As you teach the Nation of Islam, you might ask students what the
history of African-American Islam since the Great Migration tells us
about race relations. Why were Malcolm X and others in northern cities
so willing to believe that European Americans were "white devils"? In
what sense, you might ask, is the Nation of Islam's sacred story about
the origin of whites as the mistake of a black scientist a "truthful"
representation of many African Americans' experience?
Muslims and the New Immigrants after 1965
If you are able to reach the post-1965 period in your class, you might
reintroduce Muslims in a discussion of demographic changes in
contemporary America. Palestinian refugees arrived after the creation
of Israel in 1948. More important for the history of American Islam,
the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 relaxed the quota system established
in 1924, thereby allowing greater Muslim immigration. The gates opened
even more widely after the 1965 revisions of the immigration law.
Since then, Muslim migrants have fled oppressive regimes in Egypt,
Iraq, and Syria; and South Asian Muslims, as from Pakistan, have
sought economic opportunity. By the 1990s, Muslims had established
more than six hundred mosques and centers across the United States.
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