Voices of Islam (241 page)

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next generation of American Muslims to build upon an American Muslim legacy marked by resistance to racism, and the restoration of the African American community in particular. I present a spectrum of voices, primarily male voices, as the American Umma struggles to fulfill Malcolm X’s vision. I collected these voices in 2002 as part of research on relations between African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago. Chicago has substantial representation of both ethnic Muslim groups. The city holds an unrivalled historical relevance as a major site for early developments within American Islam: Chicago was the headquarters of both the Ahmadiyya and the Nation of Islam, groups with both African American and South Asian roots.
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ON ACCOMMODATING RACISM—

AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES

With an African American population of one million, Chicago remains a very important city for understanding race relations in America. During the Great Migration, Chicago became a major destination for Southern blacks leaving the South to escape the harshness of sharecropping and the horror of lynching. Ever since, Chicago has continued to tell the story of racist residential patterns especially defi by white flight and black ghettos, by quality resources for whites and poverty for blacks: ‘‘For every downtown skyscraper that kept jobs and tax dollars in the city, there was a housing project tower that confi poor people in an overcrowded ghetto
...
. Chicago is one of America’s wealthiest cities but, remarkably, nine of the nation’s ten poorest census tracts are in Chicago’s housing projects.’’
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Before they were torn down in 2002, Chicago was the home of the Robert Taylor Homes, a collection of towering high-rise projects built in the 1950s: ‘‘Its 4,415 apartments’’ made ‘‘it the largest public housing develop- ment in the world.’’ With ‘‘fenced-in external galleries,’’ the Robert Taylor Homes were once described as ‘‘filing cabinets for the poor.’’
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Abdullah Madyun, an African American Imam in Chicago, was raised in one of Chicago’s projects in the late 1960s and 1970s. His parents joined the Nation of Islam when he was a toddler and subsequently followed Imam

W. D. Mohammed into mainstream Sunni Islam after abandoning the Nation’s black nationalist teachings. (Imam W. D. Mohammed inherited the largest following of African American Muslims when his father, Elijah Muhammad, died in 1975.) Imam Abdullah attended Sister Clara Muhammad School as a boy. He studied in Saudi Arabia in his early twenties, and upon his return, separated himself from the WDM (W. D. Mohammed)
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community because he disagreed with Imam W. D. Mohammed’s religious methodology. Admired in both African American and immigrant communities, Imam Abdullah is known to captivate his

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audiences with fiery speeches that reveal an eloquent black vernacular, his words flowing with expressions that refl his experiences growing up in Black Chicago. He also dazzles his audience with his crisp Arabic, easily citing Qur’anic verse and Hadith. I had met Imam Abdullah two years prior to my research when he spoke to a predominantly South Asian and Arab mosque audience. Never before had I heard an Imam criticize immigrant Muslims who try to hide their religious and ethnic identity to pass as white. Bluntly, he addressed real issues of race and class in the American Umma.

Imam Abdullah’s critique of Muslim immigrants sounds very much like Prashad’s critique of the Desi American community, the bulk of which, the latter states, has ‘‘moved away from active political struggles toward an accommodation with this racist polity’’ in order to ‘‘accumulate economic wealth through hard work and guile.’’
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Imam Abdullah renders an analysis as thorough as Prashad’s but in terms that especially convey the cadence of black urban protest. According to Imam Abdullah, Muslim immigrants are ‘‘sinking right away into America’s economic, materialistic objective way of life.’’ The American ‘‘life’’ represents a system that has disadvantaged African Americans, largely on account of race. But this same system gives South Asian immigrants abundant opportunities, Imam Abdullah believes, because ‘‘it helps America’s economy to bring engineers and scientists here. They come from impoverished countries, but once here, we pay them good. They spend their wealth on getting the good life. But African Americans do not have the same opportunities, and, of course, it is designed like that.’’
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While this ‘‘design’’ is terribly transparent to Imam Abdullah, he sees South Asian immigrants as being ‘‘clueless’’ about it: ‘‘They are clueless about this whole American life, the traps, the plans, the objectives, the sys- tem.’’ Wali Bashir, an African American Muslim activist and friend of Imam Abdullah, shares similar sentiments. ‘‘The people buying into the American dream,’’ Wali said, ‘‘don’t realize that the American nightmare is working right under it. The beauty of America is built on the horror underneath. I don’t think a lot of them [immigrants] understand this concept. Most of them don’t even know our history.’’
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He refers to the over 200 years of labor exploitation, that is, slavery, which made America’s advance as a leading industrial nation possible. Whites continue to benefit and blacks continue to lack resources because of the residual capital and liability of slavery.

This reality seems to escape immigrants, as Imam Abdullah states, ‘‘Many of the immigrants think that our condition is because we are lazy. They think, ‘All you [African Americans] have to do is do like me. I went to school and such and such.’ They really can’t see. How can you possibly see the mecha- nism here to oppress one people, and [think that] you are not a part of it, [that] you get everything that you want and these people don’t?’’
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He refers to an overarching system of injustice that connects African Americans and immigrants: ‘‘Why did you leave your country to come here? Why couldn’t you do all these great things that you are doing here there? Why did you

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break your neck here if it’s just that easy?’’ Pakistani immigrants come here because Pakistan does not have the same resources and opportunities: ‘‘You left there to come here because there was a condition there. I can’t escape the condition here and go to Pakistan.’’ In other words, the condition of both Pakistan and black America—connected by a lack of resources and of capital—reflects the inequalities and asymmetries of a global world in which white America comes out on top. Most South Asian immigrants escape the poverty of both Pakistan and black America because they represent the elite of their native countries and can come and acquire wealth here because they are affl professional, and closer to white. They live well here, and America ‘‘keeps perpetuating materialism and capitalism all over the world.’’ Wali supports Imam Abdullah’s analysis, ‘‘Everything we get here has reper- cussion somewhere else,’’ in Pakistan and poor communities in Chicago.

Imam Abdullah argues that as affl nt South Asian Muslims perpetuate America’s economic order, they compromise their faith. ‘‘Immigrants have come here and have reaped the benefi to the point that it has killed their Islam. You come here for materialism, but you forget that you are Muslim, and you forget your responsibility to establish Allah’s
din,
’’ interpreting
din
[religion] as the means to justice. ‘‘The immigrants should be putting forth more of an effort to utilize their resources towards the upliftment of the African American community.’’ The African American community should be a priority because, according to Imam Abdullah, ‘‘the most prominent spots to establish Allah’s
din
are those places where injustices and poverty exist.’’

ON ACCOMMODATING RACISM—SOUTH ASIAN MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES

To Imam Abdullah’s remarks on the need to address injustices in African American communities, some Muslims would counter that there do exist other ways of standing up for justice. South Asian Muslims remain connected to Muslims abroad who suffer genocide, warfare, poverty, and global racism. This was the sentiment expressed by Dr. Abidullah Ghazi, a middle-aged South Asian immigrant Muslim who directs IQRA International Educational Foundation, an influential Muslim publishing house in Chicago.

In America, ‘‘there is a Pakistani association, an Indian Muslim association, a Kashmir association, a Bengali association, and they all have their own issues.’’ Dr. Ghazi made this point, desiring that critical African American Muslims consider how South Asian Muslims already deal with a range of issues within their communities: ‘‘We are first generation. We did not know America. We did not come here to live. We came here to earn our degree and go back and live happily in our own country. [But one thing led to another], children were born, we settled down, and now we belong to two

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worlds. African Americans don’t belong to two worlds.’’ Although recogniz- ing the African American’s symbolic connection to Africa, he noted, ‘‘They are not emotionally involved with what is happening there the way we are when there is nuclear warfare in India and Pakistan, when there is a massacre in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and 7,000 Muslims are killed, when there are floods and calamities in Bengal.’’ Even within English-language Pakistani news- papers like
Pakistani Link,
he said, you will find 95 percent Pakistan news and maybe five percent American news yet related to Pakistan. ‘‘Our frame of mind is not America. We are not concerned with what’s happening with blacks or whites or the society...as much as we are concerned with what is happening there, and in one’s own specifi locale. A Bangladeshi doesn’t know anything about Pakistan although it was once one country.’’
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Dr. Ghazi desires that African American Muslims consider these factors ‘‘before coming to a judgment that’’ South Asians ‘‘don’t care about African Americans.’’ He acknowledged that there are individual South Asians who are ‘‘insensitive,’’ but ‘‘the real issue and problem is not between the two communities at all. Rather the issue is the American issue: African Americans live in separate neighborhoods; the whites live in separate neighborhoods. The schools, the standard of life, the security do not compare between the inner city and the white neighborhoods.’’ Coming to America for a better life and being interested in the best education for their children, South Asians choose to live with affluent whites.

Even as South Asian Muslim immigrants live in majority white neighbor- hoods, some of them recognize the importance of establishing relations with African Americans. IQRA’s main office, for example, sits in an affluent neigh- borhood on the north side of Chicago. However, the foundation has formed relations with African American Muslims who live on the South Side of Chicago through its active recruitment of writers and designers who represent the diversity of the American Umma. IQRA’s commitment to diversity is especially dear to the executive director, Dr. Tasneema Ghazi, Dr. Ghazi’s wife. She relishes opportunities to speak about
Grandfather’s Orchard,
a children’s book written by Dr. Ghazi. Referring to the cover illustration, she states, ‘‘Here you can see the setting is the American South with an African American family. We are trying to include all Muslims, all American Muslims who are of every color and every race.’’
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Dr. Talat Sultan, the 2004–2005 president of ICNA (Islamic Circle of North America) also voiced commitment to good race relations in the American Umma. I interviewed Dr. Sultan in his offi where he serves as the principal of the Islamic Foundation School, a predominantly South Asian grade school. Its location in a mosque complex in one of Chicago’s north suburbs demonstrates once again the residential patterns that divide African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims. He acknowledged these divides and spoke of South Asians ‘‘harboring the same kinds of prejudices, [though] not to the same level, prevalent in this country.’’
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But this

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prejudice against African Americans occurs mostly among
secular
South Asian immigrants, Dr. Sultan told me, ‘‘whereas the really good Muslims who practice Islam are friendlier with African Americans.’’ The ‘‘good’’ Muslims ‘‘make deliberate efforts to have closer relationships with Afro-Americans. I myself taught at an Afro-American college for 14 years in North Carolina, Barba Scotia College in Concord.’’ It was his first job after completing his degree at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). ‘‘I really became part of the family,’’ he said. He paused for one second and then uttered words that fell short of a complete thought but gave his narra- tive the perfect frame, ‘‘This business of black and white in America at that time.’’ Aware of the color line, Dr. Sultan chose to identify with African Americans. With the ‘‘feeling of being a minority in this country,’’ it seems that you would want ‘‘to identify yourself with minorities. That is more logical to me than pretending to be a white American. Unfortunately, this is how our secular South Asians are.’’

DA‘WA
FOR THE PEOPLE—DEBATING CULTURAL CAPITAL

Dr. Sultan links interethnic solidarity with the sincere practice of Islam. However, many African American Muslims would counter that they have experienced racism at the hands of ‘‘good’’ practicing Muslims, and often in immigrant-majority mosques. Many immigrants have maintained their Muslim identity, but this does not necessarily translate into solidarity with African American Muslims. This was the sentiment of Imam Sultan Salahuddin, the Imam of the Ephraim Bahar Cultural Center, an inner- city mosque in association with Imam W. D. Mohammed. Imam Sultan recognizes the efforts of South Asian immigrants to preserve their Muslim identities and build Islamic institutions. Because of their wealth, they surpass African American Muslims in Islamic institution building. But, Imam Sultan believes, they have created Islamic institutions for their self-preservation, not to advance justice in the larger society.