The Dissemination and Implementation of Islam within the African American Community: Addressing the Sin of Racism within the Umma

Abstract

The United States may be the most racially diverse and religiously pluralistic nation-state today. However, it is also arguably the most societally biased, one where many religious communities are frequently divided along distinct lines predicated upon race, color, ethnicity, and faith tra-dition. The sociohistorical displacement and dissemination of Islamic power away from indigenous African American Muslims to the newly disembarked post-1965 immigrant Muslims underscore the nascent religio-racial origins of how Islamic identity, membership, community, and consciousness within America has now become unusually conflated with race, culture, and ethnicity within our nation’s social imaginary. That is, what it contextually means to be a Muslim in the United States has now become a highly con-tested, problematic, and racialized category within American Islam—a segregated Islamic reality and existence that is being renegotiated and challenged by modern-day Black Muslims dissatisfied with their oppressed, marginalized and subaltern condition as Muslim Americans within the umma. Black Muslims, who make up fully half of Muslims whose families have been in the United States for at least three generations (51%), have a centuries-long history in con-structing American Muslim cultures. However, Black Muslims are either erased as part of Islam’s history in the U.S. or, if accounted for, considered heretical, unorthodox, anti-American separatists.