Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (54 page)

part of the passage, the Qur’an specifically orders men and women not to deride each other, since “it may well be that those [whom they deride] are better than themselves.” Ultimately goodness is not based on a group identification.

The Muslim-American confi of identity claims to transcend problems of race or ethnicity, but because ethnicity is unclear, attitudes and practices of ethnocentricity are obscured and overlooked. In the politics of Muslim communities, organizations, institutions, and public representation, some parties claim more rights than others. These uneven and unreciprocal practices occur within group interactions, at the level of selective participation in community activities as well as in the selection and recognition of leaders. Meanwhile, all Muslim parties in America also claim to adhere to Western standards of universal human rights that explicitly prohibit disparity on the basis or race or ethnicity. In other words, despite the assumption of ethnic parity in the Qur’an and in the human rights standards in the U.S.A. (through which American Muslims also claim their rights), an equitable system of moral evaluation is
not
consistently operative in the North American Muslim communal context.

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The first Muslims in America were slaves taken primarily from West Africa. “For three hundred and fifty years, Muslim men, women, and children . . . were sold in the New World. They were among the first Africans shipped and among the very last. When they reached the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, after a horrific journey, they introduced a second monotheistic religion . . . into post- Columbian America.”
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“When the first Africans were shipped to the New World, beginning in 1501, Islam was already well established in West Africa.”
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Although Muslim slaves are an important historical reference today, Islam did not survive the American slave experience except in some customary practices whose origins in Islam would become obscured.

Later, after the end of slavery, the first collective movements towards complete human dignity for blacks in America referred to Islam as a part of a religious heritage that directly challenged post-slavery racist practices and attitudes in American policies. For some, Islam was also used to directly refute the Biblical justification for the slavery practiced in Christian America. Despite all this, slaves were only permitted to practice Christianity and this would remain the single religious choice among African-Americans for some time after the end of slavery. Historically, Islam represented the first viable and sustained religious alternative adopted by African-Americans.

The first movements among African-Americans to combat experiences of racism in America were primarily nationalist and pan-Africanist. They were quite secular in nature. Then “(i)n the first decades of the twentieth century, African-Americans began to actively form communities that defined themselves

as Islamic.”
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These were alternative religious and spiritual articulations to address the problems of identity and race in America. Although these articulations would in many cases adopt symbols and history from global Islam, they would not sustain the integrity of Islamic dogma involving belief in one supreme transcendent God, Allah, and in the prophecy and living example of the Prophet Muhammad. However, these variant references to Islam eventually led to the large conversion movements among African-Americans. Studies of one development of African-American Islam trace the movement from the early configurations of the Moorish Science Temple, through the Nation of Islam, ending with the Muslim American Society under the leadership of Warith-Deen Mohammad today. Alongside this development of African-American Islam with multiple identity reformulations through the Nation of Islam, African- Americans also became Muslim through other sources of inspiration and information. One leading source of information for African-Americans was the immigrant communities. For example, in northeastern U.S. cities in the early

part of the twentieth century, the Ahmadiyyah movement spearheaded a significant movement specifically addressed to African-Americans.
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Although African-Americans did not become Ahmadis they used this introduction to Islam to study and practice orthodox
Sunni
Islam, eventually setting up their own communities between the 1950s and 1970s. In the 1970s, attempts to integrate various indigenous and immigrant Muslim communities began in earnest.

As it relates to identity, Muslim immigrants to North America have a varied history in this context. Three major phases of immigration differently affect the extent to which Islam itself played a factor in immigration to and integration into America. Like every other immigrant group to America after the African slaves, Muslims come to America seeking better opportunities. These opportunities are overwhelmingly defined in concrete terms of materialism and American civil liberties. The first groups of immigrants that concern us came from Arabic-speaking countries in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Many were not Muslim but all came to America for purely secular reasons. Muslim and non-Muslim Arab immigrants linked with each other through shared cultural experiences as Arabs. Such links persist today.
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Some efforts to maintain Islam were minimal and cultural at best. Efforts to establish Islam as a feature of an American subculture among Arabic- speaking immigrants were nonexistent. Such efforts would not take root and become widespread even among the earlier immigrants until subsequent waves of Muslim immigration.

A change in U.S. immigration laws in the 1960s opened the doors for a larger influx of Muslims who would come with greater emphasis on sustaining aspects of their cultural and ethnic identity and origins, including Islam. More Arabic- speaking immigrants followed and large numbers of South Asian immigrants began to arrive. The increase in South Asian Muslim immigrants would

eventually lead to a stronger effort among immigrants to form a distinctive American Muslim identity. For one thing, the overwhelming majority of South Asian Muslims to come to North America were economically well off. They came with the expressed interest of pursuing professional development and material progress for themselves and their children. Islam was an intimate part of their cultural identity, and was also emphasized in their efforts to preserve their culture, since the faith was not in conflict with their material aspirations.

Except for the Ahmadiyyahs, banished as heretical from Pakistan in the 1960s, South Asian Muslim immigrants showed little or no interest in propagating Islam among the general American population except for some white women who either converted to Islam before or during marriage or were married despite their lack of conversion. Very few white American males would enter Islam until the development of strong Sufi movements in America in the 1970s and 1980s. Even today, Caucasian American converts are overwhelmingly female, with some estimates as high as eighty-five percent.

Islam as a feature of American communities took off in earnest during the 1970s. This public emergence was primarily local, in the form of establishing more mosques and community centers. The Muslim Student Association (MSA) started in 1963 at a number of campuses across the U.S.A. and Canada. As an umbrella organization, MSA worked with Muslim students in the universities as well as with Muslim community organizations. By the 1970s, other national immigrant and African-American institutions were organizing or re-organizing. Such movements would continue and proliferate into the 1990s.
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The national-level institutionalization of collectives with an explicit Islamic identity component is a key indicator of the movement among Muslims in America toward greater inclusion in American public life. As these organizations and institutions proliferate, they indicate the spread of Islam and the growth of Muslims’ interest in their citizenship as Americans. They also indicate some of the schisms among Muslims. To be sure, these schisms are not merely on the basis of race and ethnicity, but also relate to perspectives on Islam and specific issues of concern to Muslim collectives. In any case, all such organizations represent a claim to autonomous identities simultaneously as Muslim and American. The need for national recognition is often indicated by the titles given to these groups and by the nature of their operations. The use of the word “American” implies at some level that they are representatives of Muslim or of Islamic interest in the American context. U.S. officials rarely inquire about their real constituency, even if noted by the organization itself. The conflict between their respective perspectives on Islam as well as the ethnic homogeneity of the participants indicate that these groups do not reflect a consensus of Muslims in the U.S.A. Yet, many of these groups continue to project themselves as representative. In a crisis like that following September 11, 2001, contention among the organizations surfaced about how accurately they represented their American Muslim constituency.

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Before his death in 1967, Malcolm X would draw two important conclusions as a direct consequence of eighteen weeks of travel in the Middle East and Africa. First, he concluded that the problems of non-white peoples were identical against the capitalist racial hegemony of colonialism, and that all non-whites were more or less in the same circumstance
vis-a`-vis
white supremacy. Secondly, Malcolm said, “America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.”
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Malcolm believed the Muslim world and Muslim society were color-blind. “On a superficial level, it appeared that Malcolm X, like other na¨ıve observers of Islamic countries, believed that this area

of the world was free of the evils of racism. However, more substantively, we must ask ourselves how such an astute observer of human affairs could have missed the patterns of racial separatism that had such deep roots in the Islamic world.”
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How are both these perspectives simultaneously true?

Malcolm’s comments reflect the duality of experience among Muslims in their own countries and those who come to America. When I have lived and traveled in the Muslim Middle East, North and South Africa, South and Southeast Asia,
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as an African-American woman, I have felt an extreme affinity with Muslims of color. Despite this international feeling, the politics of racial and ethnic hegemony is blatant in my own home country, where I continually experienced a sense of “otherness” setting me apart from Muslim immigrants and their descendants. The contrast between these two experiences leads me to assume that there is an important factor in the American context that tends to engender this double standard. Although Muslim communities in America endeavor to hold collective and racially diverse activities, meetings, and celebrations, there are still persistent ethnic and racial sentiments that prevent us from sustaining radical pluralism in our communities.

Furthermore, these problems of race and ethnicity in American Muslim communities prevent us from achieving effective unity for overcoming larger external obstacles to our empowerment as a single religious minority in America. Indeed, it is often at the national level where the negative consequences of these yet unreconciled problems are most glaring. Various Muslim organizations continue to form on the national level. Each vies to be recognized by non-Muslim authorities and accepted by the Muslim masses as representative of Islam in America. However, racial parity in American Islam seems as illusive as gender parity globally. Often, leaders of national Muslim organizations and institutions are uninterested in gaining grassroots-level cooperation or acceptance, since they find the diversity among Muslim perspectives too tedious

to overcome before they move forward with their agenda. Meanwhile, few grassroots organizations rise to achieve national recognition.
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Historically, many new mosques or splinter organizations and Muslim centers were formed on the basis of ethnicity; none would directly reject other Muslim

ethnicities, however. According to the
Mosque Report
issued by CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), there is still great fluidity between cultures in the mosques and community centers across America.
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Understandably, each collective gathers around shared symbols, past experiences, and perspectives on Islamic praxis as a basis for mutuality and understanding. But such sharing is not necessarily as Islamic as it is cultural or ethnic in origin. When others outside the dominant ethnic or racial group are present at collective gatherings, the distinctions between history, culture, and Islam often go unobserved or without comment. Sometimes what is shared are the distinctive languages or dialects, diet, or other customs.

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The overwhelming majority of African-Americans gravitating towards Islam are drawn to its humanizing articulation of social justice as well as to the divine nature of the Qur’an. As already mentioned, the extent to which actual experiences of racial justice are affirmed in the living reality of Muslim community relations is varied.

Historically, African-Americans had already experienced the abuses of power and denial of full civil liberties in the United States. Immigrant Muslim Americans have become direct victims of these abuses in a dramatic way since September 11, 2001. The African-American communities are the best place for Muslims to gain constructive insights about such U.S. abuses of power, and about strategies to combat them. Before September 11, 2001 few opportunities were offered Muslims to discuss these insights among themselves. There is need for substantive organized forums to allow meaningful dialogue along these lines and to benefit all Muslims in America. Before September 11 immigrant Muslims did not equally experience these abuses of power. Perhaps now they will see a greater imperative in addressing inter-community antagonisms and negative ethnic relations with African-American Muslims for the express purpose of addressing the larger systemic violations of civil liberties.