Voices of Islam (246 page)

74
Voices of Change

claims of authenticity. But this is not the end of the damage. The story of African American Muslims has centered on the story of The Nation of Islam, which has been told as a ‘‘failed Christian’’ story with Black nationalism as its core mission. Scholars have ridiculed the NOI creation story, their desire to separate from whites who kill them, and their demands for freedom and justice.

Other communities of black Muslims (those not in the Nation of Islam) have been relegated to the margins of history or have been ignored, thus affi a popular though erroneous thesis that all black Americans come to Islam through the Nation of Islam. The majority of black Americans who transition to Islam do so with deliberation and belief in Islam’s central tenets and the viability of its disciplines. This brief treatment of black American Islam will offer a different way of understanding the various communities that make a note of a legacy rather than a protest.

By 1700, there were over 50,000 escaped and freed Africans in America.
11

This would lead any investigator to speculate that their progeny multiplied and were able to continue some of their preslavery traditions. Historical records discovered to date do not give a breakdown of country of origin of these free Africans, so we do not know who these men and women were. We do know, however, that not all Africans in America were enslaved. And, while history has focused on eastern seaboard Africans, they lived across the Mississippi in the West too.
12
What we do know from the runaway slave notices is that some slaves were Muslims. We also know that southern states such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana had the most numerous plantations and ports of entry. We also affirm that two of the most prominent African American communities to affiliate themselves with Islam in the twen- tieth century were led by men—Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Mohammad— who came from these regions. I would like to suggest a scenario that is woven around the vagaries of life in the early twentieth century for African Americans and the continuing transmission of knowledge about Islam in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Gomez asserts:

It is therefore with the children and grandchildren of African-born Muslims that the questions concerning the resilience of Islam take on signifi . While it cannot be established with certainty that the progeny were Muslim, the Islamic heritage was certainly there, so individuals bore Muslim names and retained a keen memory of the religious practices of their ancestors.
13

History texts recount President Abraham Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves in 1863, but reality teaches us that in some regions, it took quite some time for that information to be passed along. This lack of communication is remem- bered in Juneteenth celebrations and is noted in several texts.
14
In a brief review of early black legal history we fi that under the Republican Party, Congress passed the 14th Amendment (as part of Reconstruction) in 1866

Islam in the African American Experience
75

(ratified in 1868), which extended citizenship to blacks and protected their civil rights. In 1870 the states ratified the 15th Amendment, which prohib- ited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1875 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial discrimination in ‘‘inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters and other places of amusement.’’ Between 1861 and 1865, 20 black men were elected to the

U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Southern Democrats, aided by Northern businessmen, ended this period of unusual collaboration with terror. Democrats and groups like the Klu Klux Klan began a reign of terror to keep blacks from the polls and public places and to reinstate a racial divide that lasted for the next 80 years.

This ending of any collaboration between blacks and whites is the beginning of what is known in American history as the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ era, which lasted from 1865 to 1964 with the passage of the nation’s second Civil Rights Act. Jim Crow was the system of laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and discrimination throughout the United States. Jim Crow was the name of a character in minstrel shows (in which white performers in blackface used African American stereotypes in their songs and dances); it is not clear how the term came to describe American segregation and discrimination.
15
Nevertheless, this term was widely used and its horrors were widely applied. While this was the social and political arena in which all blacks functioned, there arose the difficulty of what to name the ex-slave population. Rather than just calling them by their names—John or Moosa—whites decided that they must be further distinguished. The first nonderogatory appellation was ‘‘African,’’ which was used in the early eighteenth century. This was changed to slave and/or Negro in the 1830s, changed to ‘‘colored’’ after World War II, changed back to ‘‘Negro’’ in the 1950s and early 1960s, changed to ‘‘blacks’’ in late 1960s and early 1970s, changed to ‘‘Afro-Americans’’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and finally, though still contentious, changed in the late 1980s to a list of terms— ‘‘blacks, blackAmerican or Blackamerican, and African American.’’ Needless to say, naming and identity are still in question as is the relationship of black Americans to Africa.

Gomez postulates that there were several connections between ex-slave communities that continued to practice or at least know something about Islam and leaders of nascent Muslim communities in the twentieth century.
16
This assertion is plausible because there must have been some contact either through cultural lore, and actual meetings of descendents or immigrants. Leaders like Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Muhammad have been continually discredited Islamically in a number of ways, the most consistent of which has been that they had no connection to any Islamic retention. Gomez’s
Black Crescent
recounts the stories of the Melungeon and the Ishmaelite communities who lived in overlapping territories and whose self- descriptions linked them to an Islamic past. The Ishmaelite community

76
Voices of Change

seems to have had the most direct connection to Islam and certainly, through its members, connects a past Islamic experience to Noble Drew Ali.
17

I see these broad stances as a tripod of Islamic beginnings in the twentieth century. Other researchers could of course use another rubric but let us explore this paradigm for a moment. This tripod is anchored in an ownership of the Islamic worldview, which can be believed in and practiced with integ- rity and certainty, and is not dependent on the cultures of other Muslims. By this I mean that there is an inherent legacy, the explanation of a present condition, and a viable way of life in the present and in the future that permit black American Muslims to be independent actors. One leg of the tripod issues from a mixture of available philosophies/worldviews with some form of Islam at the center that black people could know and use to understand their present conditions and give structure to their future. One example (and it is only an example of an approach to embracing Islam) is Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple founded in either 1912 or 1913 and based on the Holy Qur’an of the Moorish Science Temple, Circle Seven. This thin text is an obvious mixture of materials but also possibly a deliberate one.

The religiously fertile era of American history that Noble Drew Ali lived in is fi with contenders for the souls of black folks. In this scenario, let us speculate that even though there are traces of millenarianism, the beginnings of the Social Gospel Movement, and an ever increasing number of itinerant preachers in this movement, Ali was deliberate in his choice of affiliation with Islam rather than Christianity or some other religion.

Ali’s synthesis of various approaches to a God-centered universe along with a guide to ethical living and self-suffi ency is one type of milestone in the development of Islam in black America. This version of Islam chose to root itself in a tragic yet rich cultural legacy. The use of the term ‘‘Moor’’ was not as fanciful as many researchers would have us believe. Perhaps its real origin lay in the recountings of Melungeons and Ishmaelites and that some African slaves did indeed come through coastal towns in Morocco. I would question the insistence on ‘‘unknowable origins’’ rather than ascribing to an actor the ability to choose. If we are able to see the Moorish Science Temple as playing its role in an ongoing process that places its roots in a slave past, then we can see a different set of correlates in the development of black American Islam.

Ali’s formulation of the ethos of his community—love, truth, peace, free- dom, and justice—is directly in line with Islamic values. To assist in surviving the psychological ramifi tions of namelessness, Ali provided a nationality and a way to build a self-sufficient community in Jim Crow America. In this community fi names were retained while surnames, most clearly and directly tied to slavery, were changed to Bey or El. Rather than affi a name based on skin color or the texture of hair, he planted his community’s heritage in Morocco—a place that could be identified on a map. The inherit- ance of the general contours of Islam coming from slave roots resulted in the

Islam in the African American Experience
77

retention of some basic elements without the particulars. For example, Moors prayed facing east three times daily and in a different posture from other Muslims. In addition, they fasted and congregated on Friday and Sunday. Given the nature of work for black Americans in the fi decades of the twentieth century, to take off for a few hours on Friday would have guaranteed dismissal. When the South Asian Ahmadiyyah Muslim Movement brought English translations of the Qur’an to the black community, they studied it, adding its contents to their store of knowledge.

The community of the Moorish Science Temple focused its attention on reclaiming and rebuilding family life on the basis of on an Islamic worldview. They spread up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest attracting, it is reported, some 30,000 members over time.

As one leg of a tripod, this community represents one way of claiming a legacy and also one impulse in black America toward owning Islam. As one modern expression of Islam torn from its roots of learning and community, the Moorish Science Temple represents one picture of a reemergent Islam that had to survive in the midst of terror, chaos, and dehumanization. Black people at the turn of the century were herded into colonies and did not have the freedom of movement that many immigrants had. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, in the classic study
Black Metropolis
assert:

The distinctive thing about the Black Belt is that while other such ‘‘colonies’’ tend to break up with the passage of time, the Negro area becomes increasingly more concentrated.
18

World War I ushered in a period of austerity and depression. Blacks who had migrated to the Midwest and the Northeast for a ‘‘taste of freedom’’ or at least an absence of reminders of slavery were met with Jim Crow, lynching, and outright hatred. Colony living produced communities of people who relied on each other for survival. Blacks from various regions in the south converged and naturally shared knowledge and experiences.

By the 1920s, Muslims from the Ottoman Empire had emigrated to the United States and white Americans such as Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb had embraced Islam. Muslim immigrants, though not in significant numbers, were in the United States. Among these Muslim immigrants were members of the Ahmadiyyah Movement from India. They were sent as missionaries to America. Though their intended targets for conversion were white Americans, they found their most ardent audience in the black community. This transmission of Islam as a ‘‘foreign’’ worldview forms the second leg of the tripod. This culturally encrusted Islamic worldview cannot be owned; however, it can be rented or leased.

Immigrants and their children own Islam as a worldview that has been in their countries for centuries. Quite naturally, most are only minimally aware of cultural accretions and have little consciousness of the process that gave

78
Voices of Change

them ownership of their religion. Also quite natural is their tendency to see a different manifestation of Islam as illegitimate. While looking closely at the process of ownership of Islam in the Muslim world we can easily see that in modern and contemporary times, much of the ownership was formed in colonial and postcolonial contexts, which gave a special hue to the process. Though they are themselves in a reformation period, immigrants bring their various Islams as the only Islam, often divorced from Islam’s basic tenets. What this has meant for many black Muslims is that they can never own Islam as they are often castigated about what they do not know. A first-generation immigrant Muslim child can correct a black third-generation Muslim adult on matters of faith and practice.

Islam, as a foreign religion, is by no means unconnected to the first leg of Islam in the black Muslim experience. Struts (binding straps) connect all the legs and permit individuals and sometimes whole communities to move back and forth from one type of Islam to another even though the legs have roots in different histories. For example, some members of the Moorish Science Temple moved to the Ahmadiyyah community and for varying reasons moved again to other communities or back to the Moorish Science Temple. One prominent reason seems to stem from their search for a world- view that they could own.

Islam as a foreign worldview brought culturally constructed Islam to America with its food, dress, behaviors, and names. The Ahmadis introduced an English translation of the Qur’an, books on worship and practice, Hadith literature, books singling out women as an issue, and books on names. In this leg of the tripod, Islam was only tangentially a slave legacy. Rather, Islam in America was portrayed as the direct result of the efforts of immigrant Mus- lims and their knowledge. Black Muslims infl ed by the Ahmadiyyah opened the First Pittsburgh Mosque in the 1920s where there were formal classes in Arabic and classes on how to pray, the requirements of fasting, and so on. Blacks were encouraged to abandon their names for Arabic and/ or Indian names. This leg of the tripod served to separate and isolate black Muslims from both the black community and the Moorish Science Temple, whose efforts at self-sufficiency were rooted in the black community.