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Islam in
America: The American Islam
by Ameen Izzadeen
(Deputy Editor The Sunday Times and Daily Mirror-Sri Lanka)
In 2003 Ameen Izzadeen spent nearly a month in the United States
as a guest of the US State Department. This is part one of a series of
observations penned after his visit.
As an outside observer Mr. Izzadeens insights are both enlightening and squarely
on the mark. Mr. Izzadeen addresses the concerns of Post 9-11 Muslims in
America and the campaign to vilify the American Muslims. We present
the series in its entirety.
Islam in America (P-3)
The American Islam: The struggle for unity
Friday, October 17th 2003
Is Islam one or many? Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam,
Druze Islam, Ahmadi Islam and the Nation of Islam… the list goes on. Besides, in
the modern lexicon, one finds terms such as historical Islam, moderate Islam,
liberal Islam, political Islam, radical Islam, extremist Islam and even a
Seventh Century Islam with some of these terms being complimentary but a large
number of them are derogatory.
The terms that are derogatory are as old as Islam
itself, but in the aftermath of 9/11, they have been used liberally by Western
critics as well as politicians to demean Islam.
At the receiving end of this
barrage of insults, are Muslims in America. But they are silent no more, as the
title of former Congressman Paul Findley's latest book suggests. How they
counter such criticism is a jihad in itself. Their jihad is waged at the
intellectual level and they are reaping the fruits of it. The irony is the more
Islam is criticized, the more the West sees the real Islam. I shall discuss this
struggle in detail in my next installment.
This week's article focuses on
part of that struggle aimed at unifying different versions of Islam.
There are two major streams of
Islam in America: The Islam practiced by early migrants or African Americans and
the Islam of latter day migrants from Asia, including the Arab West Asians. The
dichotomy was evident when more than 50,000 adherents of the two groups held
their annual conventions in Chicago in the first week of September at venues
that were just three miles apart.
We visited both of these
conventions and met several scholars, community leaders and officials. One of
the questions that bugged us was: If Islam called for the unity of its
adherents, why couldn’t they hold one convention?
Organizers of the Islamic Society
of North America (ISNA), a group largely representative of the Asian Muslim
migrant community, told the media that the two groups enjoyed total comfort and
cooperation regardless of the separate conventions.
But to any observer, the split
was obvious. Throughout the United States, the two groups operate their own
mosques and Islamic centers. Their goals, aspirations and struggles also
differ. Yet we could see a silver lining among the dark clouds - the gap is
being narrowed. The Afro-American Muslims, who comprise more than 30 percent of
10 million or so Muslims in America, are moving in the direction of a merger
with their brethren from Asia, despite differences which are rooted partly in
the way Islam came to America and spread among Americans.
With American Muslims striving to
present a positive image of Islam in the face of new challenges that confront
them after 9/11, leaders on both sides say they can ill afford rifts within
their community.
"We're different culturally and
we're different ethnically and that creates some difficulties in terms of
communication and understanding," Imam Earl Abdul Malik Mohammed, a national
representative of black Muslim leader Imam W. Deen Mohammed of the American
Society of Muslims, told Associated Press in an interview.
Though the two conventions in
Chicago were just three miles apart and there was a special shuttle bus service
between the two venues, the two groups held on to their own agendas.
As I discussed in my two earlier
essays, Muslims came to the United States as explorers two to five centuries
before Columbus and then as slaves from Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries.
These early Muslims struggled to keep their religion alive. In Alex Haley's best
seller 'Roots: The Saga of An American Family', the struggle of Kunta Kinte to
preserve his Islamic roots has been vividly depicted. The book motivated many
Afro-Americans in the late 1970s to trace their genealogical history and Islamic
roots.
Despite their struggle to keep
their Islamic identity, the Islam of the early immigrants underwent gradual
change, veering away from mainstream Islam. The Afro-American Muslims believed
that Allah was their God and Quran was their book; but various rituals,
practices, interpretations and adaptations made them a distinct group. They also
lived scattered throughout the United States. They were not a force to be
reckoned with till the 1960s when they rediscovered their religion through Black
Nationalist movements and the Nation of Islam, a controversial
Afro-American group.
According to historians, the
Nation of Islam (NOI) had its origin in two institutions:
(a) two black self-improvement
movements that began shortly before World War I - the "Moorish Science Temple of
America," founded in 1913 by Timothy Drew, and the "Universal Negro Improvement
Association," founded in 1914 by Marcus Garvey.
(b) the NOI was also shaped by
Wallace Dodd Ford, a depression-era (1929) convicted drug dealer. Upon his
release from California's San Quentin Prison in 1929, he moved to Detroit to
start a new life. Ford used a number of names, including Wali Farad and claimed
to be from Mecca, Arabia.
A. I. Palmer of the Society for
Adherents of the Sunnah says that Ford alias Wali Farad's parentage was a
mixture of white and South Pacific Maori and he used his skin color and his
prison con skills to pass himself off to blacks as a "mystic" and a "prophet"
from the Middle East.
"Working as a door-to-door rug
salesman by day, Ford blended the ideas of Garvey and Drew along with a
smattering of Islam, to form what would later become the Nation of Islam. Among
his first students was an unemployed Georgia migrant worker, Elijah Poole, whom
Ford renamed Elijah Muhammad. In later years, Ford mysteriously disappeared and
Elijah assumed leadership of the NOI which he held until his death in 1975," Mr.
Palmer says.
Elijah Muhammad developed a convoluted
belief system based on ideas extracted from everything from Christianity to
Masonry to Islam. He elevated Ford's status to that of the Creator of the
heavens and the earth, and himself to a prophet.
In brief, the NOI doctrine states that the first
humans, a race of black people, whom the NOI calls 'the Original Man,' created
white people in a genetic experiment 6,000 years ago. Elijah Muhammad claimed
that they (the whites) would rule the world for 6,000 years and then be
destroyed at the 'end of their time' by the blacks. He said that 'Judgement
Day' means that at the 'end of time' the gods (i.e., blacks) would destroy the
entire white race (devils) and then establish a Paradise (nation) on this
earth ruled forever by the blacks (i.e., gods).
But mainstream Islam teaches that there is only one
God and Prophet Muhammad is the seal of Prophethood. For these reasons, many
migrant Muslims consider the Nation of Islam as a cult - like the Ahmadi or
Qadiyani Islam of Ghulam Ahmed of the
Indian subcontinent.
One of the prominent Afro-American Muslims who
broke ranks with Elijah Muhammad's NOI and rediscovered mainstream Islam was
civil rights activist Malcolm X who was introduced to the movement while he was
serving a prison term in 1956. Malcolm X, who changed his name to Malik al-Shabazz,
left the NOI in 1964 after he challenged the lifestyle of Elijah Muhammad and
returned from the Haj pilgrimage. He formed an organization called Muslim Mosque
Inc and in 1965 was assassinated in New York.
The split in the NOI was also a reawakening. The
mantle of leadership of the NOI fell on W. Deen Mohammed, the son of Elijah
Muhammad. He was a visionary from his student days at the University of Islam -
the name the NOI gave to its schools, including primary schools. He questioned
his father's Islam and compared notes with mainstream Islam, which he was
attracted to.
Imam W. Deen Mohammed gradually moved his hundreds
of thousands of followers towards mainstream Islam. But Louis Farrakhan
lagged behind and revived the old Nation of Islam under his leadership.
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