Samory Rashid

According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (Esposito 1995), of the “three to four million adherents in the United States today … roughly a third of the Muslims in continental America are African Americans.” Stone’s study in The Muslims of America (Haddad 1991) estimates that African Americans are 30 percent of the American Muslim population.

A Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) mosque study (CAIR 2001) also estimated African Americans to be 30 percent of the American Muslim population. Yet despite their significant numerical presence, African American Muslims have been marginalized in the literature on Islam in the United States. For example, except for Aminah McCloud’s African American Islam, to my knowledge no other major study has been published on mainstream (i.e., Sunni) Islam that has been written by an African American Muslim. Only a very small number of studies have been written by African Americans (e.g., Turner, Marsh, and possibly Barboza). This is especially tragic when one considers that at over one million strong, African Americans constitute the largest Muslim minority among Muslims in the United States.

According to the WOI theory, Islam was first introduced by enslaved Africans but failed to take root in the United States. Thus, Islam was not permanently established until 1893, when Alexander Russel Webb established the first mosque in North America. Subsequent to this, immigrant Muslims extended Webb’s initial efforts by permanently establishing Islam in this country during the twentieth century.

In recent years, prominent studies by Austin (1984), Diouf (1998), Quick (1996), Turner (1997), Muhammad (1999), Afroz (2000), Dannin (2002), and Lotfi (2002) have provided new grounds for challenging the assumptions of the WOI theory by definitively documenting the survival of mainstream Islam among blacks throughout the Americas. Yet unanswered by these studies is the lingering question of whether the type of Islam first introduced by Africans is the same mainstream Islam practiced by African Americans. It is my contention that the Islam practiced by African Americans today does not, by and large, come from immigrants, but rather from the tradition of Islam in black America first introduced by enslaved Africans.
 
This study is in three parts. The first part establishes the historical and numerical importance of African American Muslims, the second part offers a brief examination of the WOI theory, and the third part develops the hidden transcripts theory as an alternative to the WOI theory. Included therein is an example of how the hidden transcript theory illuminates history in a way that the WOI theory cannot.

African American Muslims

Although Muslims in the United States are usually associated with Arabs, an American Muslim is more likely to be African American than an Arab.1 This fact is obscured by the way statistics on American Muslims are routinely grouped, with Saudi, Iraqi, Egyptian, and other Arab Muslims pooled into a single broad category of “Arabs,” just as Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi Muslims (are classified as “South Asian,” regardless of their country of origin). African/black Muslims from various countries, (e.g., the United States, Nigeria, Senegal, or Somalia) are almost never pooled or grouped in this way. As a result, their number as a percentage of the total Muslim population in the United States is consistently underestimated and, therefore, underrepresented.2

The question may arise as to who I mean by “African American Muslim.” Quite simply, I mean black Muslims born in the United States. I am not talking here about black immigrants. In fact, the whole immigrant- indigenous typology comes from the WOI theory, not from me. The important concern here is nationality. Simply put, blacks are the largest nationality of Muslims in this country. I prefer to think about Muslims through the prism of nationality, for it is a much clearer concept. Black Africans have played a pivotal role in Islam since its very beginning. The first muezzin of Islam was Bilal, a black African man. Some writers, like Montgomery Watt, argue that Bilal may have been the first person outside Prophet Muhammad’s family to embrace Islam. The Prophet’s only adopted son was Zayd bin Harith, a former slave. Islam was practiced in Africa for more than a thousand years before it arrived in the Americas via slavery.

Sylviane Diouf and Sultana Afroz both argue that enslaved Africans played an important role in bringing Islam to the United States. The first enslaved people in this country were from Spain. These Spanish-speaking slaves were crypto-Muslims of African descent seeking to escape from Spain and the Spanish Inquisition.3 Diouf claims that “… far from making the African religious fervor disappear, slavery deepened it.”4 Muslim slaves hailed from such prominent African ethnic groups as the Hausas, Fulanis, Wolofs, Mandingos, Senegambians, as well as Muslims from “Guinea,” and those loosely described as either “Moors” or “Turks.” Therefore, the history of Islam in the United States cannot be separated from black Africans. This history, especially prior to the twentieth century, has been ignored by WOI theory proponents throughout the Americas.

When nationality is used to refer to a person’s country of origin, African Americans represent the single largest and oldest Muslim nationality in the United States. Yet, because definitions are not consistently applied in the literature on Islam in this country, misleading images of Muslims are often conveyed. Several major studies estimate black Muslims to be 30 percent of the estimated total of American Muslim population.5 However, African American scholars like Ali Mazrui offer higher estimates. According to him, 42 percent of all American Muslims are black Muslims.6

If blacks constitute one-third of all American Muslims, this means that they number at least 1 million, if you believe the low-end estimates of a total of 3 million American Muslims often given by WOI theorists. Haddad cites a similar estimate of 3 million Muslims in her Muslims of North America study. Perhaps reflecting the subjectivity of such estimates, Larry Poston’s chapter in Haddad’s Muslims in America (1991) estimates that there are 2 million black Muslims. I do not know of any other Muslim nationality (i.e., Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis, Indians, or Pakistanis) who are described in the literature as numbering 1 or 2 million. In addition to this, events since 9/11 would lead most people to believe that Muslim immigration to the United States over the past 2 years has not increased dramatically and has probably decreased. Meanwhile, black “converts” to Islam, as Danin asserts, continues to account for “90% of all Muslim converts in the U.S.”

Long-time observers of the American Muslim population’s estimated size often find such estimates amusing. For instance, in response to the frequent questions regarding the number of Muslims in this country, Malcolm X was fond of saying in the1950s and 1960s : “Those that say do not know, and those that know do not say.” This statement is still true today.

Given this background, it seems reasonable to ask why American Muslims are so consistently depicted as either foreigners or immigrants, while African American and other indigenous Muslims, including Latinos/Latinas, Anglo, and Native American Muslims remain virtually invisible to the public. I believe that Muslims are consistently depicted as foreigners and immigrants due the climate of fear that presently exists. Since the public is afraid of foreign and immigrant Muslims, it is they, rather than indigenous Muslims, who attract the most attention. In addition, most Americans, even Muslim Americans, are unaware that Africans were the first to introduce Islam to the Americas centuries before the establishment of the United States as a nation.

A personal drama with a Pakistani colleague’s family illustrates this point. A colleague’s wife once embarrassed me when, consistent with Islamic etiquette (adab), she refused to shake my extended hand at a dinner party that included both Muslim and non-Muslim guests. Dramas like these are easy enough to accommodate. But when the woman’s daughter, a young well-educated professional at the same party innocently asked me “What prison were you in when you converted to Islam?” it became abundantly clear to me that even well-educated, well-intentioned Muslims could benefit from greater awareness of African American Muslims.

My colleague’s daughter never considered the possibility that I might have a background similar to her father’s, who is now deceased, even though her father and I both worked for the same academic institution as college professors. This encounter reminded me that sometimes progress moves at a “two steps forward, one step backward” pace. By this, I mean that just as it took nearly 30 years for the public to appreciate the value of Malcolm X, an ex-convict and African American Muslim martyr, it may take additional years before others fully realize that all African American Muslims are not ex-convicts.

Before moving to the next section, a final word is in order concerning the authenticity of Islam among blacks in the Americas. The question of Islamic authenticity among blacks in Africa and throughout the African diaspora has long been recognized and challenged by scholars and practitioners alike. Diouf’s pioneering study, Servants of Allah, acknowledges how the practice of viewing Islam as an exclusively Middle East Arab religion ignores its role as an African religion and obscures an important aspect of Islam in this country. 7 Nevertheless, like nearly all WOI theorists, Diouf believes that Islam among Africans, African Americans, and blacks – whatever one prefers to call them – failed to survive.

Daniel Pipes also raises the question of whether blacks are legitimately Muslim in his Militant Islam Reaches America (2002.) Pipes agrees with Diouf that although there are some signs of lingering Islamic influence, it failed to survive. Thus, he calls the idea of a surviving legacy of Islam among blacks “romantic.” Diouf, on the other hand, believes that such an idea is “ironic.” Comments by Smith and Haddad also imply that black Muslims may not be authentic in that some black Muslims “claim” an identification with Islam. The dust jacket to Robert Dannin’s book includes comments of praise from Smith and Haddad.8 In this praise, they refer to his subjects as activists and ex-slaves seeking redemption from society. But not once are these subjects referred to simply as Muslims. This is a consistent pattern in Haddad’s and other’s works. Thus, according to this perspective, there is no such thing as a surviving legacy of Islam among blacks in America.

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