One Faith, Two Minds

At noon on a recent Friday at the Bilal Islamic Center on South Central Avenue, African American Muslims turned their attention to the call to prayer. A leader in a brightly colored skullcap faced east and began an Arabic chant--not in the high-pitched, nasal tone of a Middle Eastern imam but with the soulful sound of a black jazz musician.

Worshipers’ head coverings tended toward baseball caps for the men and floral scarves for the women, not the turbans and veils typical of the more ethnically diverse mosques whose worshipers are immigrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The setting also blended traditions of Islam with American roots. The Bilal center’s mosque is a converted house with a dirt parking lot set in an empty field; it has a rural feel, very different from the elaborate stone structures common among Islamic American mosques.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, such differences have taken on new significance. Ironically, the increasing attention on Muslims in America has left many African American Muslims feeling marginalized. “We share the faith with immigrant Muslims, but not much else,” says Abdul Karim Hasan, Bilal’s director. “For African American Muslims, the priorities are economic justice, education and service to humanity at the street level in our country. We don’t make decisions based on what is good for Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East.”

Indeed, after the service, there was a call for volunteers to help at a Skid Row shelter and for recruits to teach Islam to women in prison. There was also an update on legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, who has not yet announced whether he will accept an invitation to represent American Muslims in a public service video to be distributed in the Middle East as part of Hollywood’s response to terrorism.

Founded in the early ‘50s, the Bilal Center offers a clear example of ways that African American Muslims blend their religious convictions with their mission to the community around them. Hasan, who was honored by the Los Angeles City Council last fall for his years of service to the community, says African Americans proved themselves long ago to be good Muslims and good Americans. They are accepted around the world as members of the faith, he says, but since the terrorist attacks on the U.S., Islam in America has become synonymous with Arab Muslims, and he believes people curious about the faith are getting the wrong impression.

“Those who are making the most noise right now aren’t speaking for all Muslims,” says Hasan, a trim man in his 60s. “When it comes to how Islam is actually practiced here, we African American Muslims know more about it than anyone.”

Scholars of religion and history say the American Muslim community is in a state of flux. Bringing some 50 ethnic groups together under one united front will take time.

“Until now, Islam in America has been an example of what the Koran describes as streams that flow together but don’t mix,” says Zahid Bukhari, Pakistani-born research director of Muslim Americans in the Public Square. His group is researching demographics, participation in the political process and the role and functions of mosques for American Muslims in a study sponsored by Pew Charitable Trusts.

“My personal observation is that all American Muslim leaders are aware that they need to work together,” says Bukhari, a fellow at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Yet since Sept. 11, while a small number of African Americans have been present at high-profile news conferences, interfaith prayer services and meetings between President Bush and American Muslim leaders, the focus has been Middle Eastern politics and the protection of Muslim immigrants. Some African Americans say black Muslims included in these high-level gatherings are being relegated to the background when they could be explaining Islam in ways American audiences can understand.

“The complaint is fair,” says Dr. Maher Hathout, senior advisor for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a Los Angeles-based Muslim leader who was present at those public events. “However, it’s explainable. The events of Sept. 11 by their nature focused on Arabs; those of us who were accused were naturally the ones who were interviewed.”

He says that his group has reached out to African Americans, but says more could be done to breach the gaps within the American Muslim community. “Immigrants and indigenous American Muslims see America differently,” he said, adding that greater dialogue would benefit both groups.

African American Muslims have been active in the U.S. since at least the 1920s. Some claim the history goes back to the slave era, when African Muslims were brought to this country. Most of the earliest converts learned the faith from immigrants born in Muslim countries. In 1930, a salesman named Wallace D. Fard founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit as a black separatist movement with a doctrine that bears little resemblance to the Muslim faith.

“African American Islam has two strains,” says Sulayman Nyang, professor of African Studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “The early families embraced orthodox Islam; the Nation of Islam has been known as an anti-white, anti-American, racist movement.”

American Islam made broader impressions in the ‘60s when social activist Malcolm X, once a prominent member of the Nation of Islam, embraced orthodox Islam, and Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964. He was also part of a breakup within the black Muslim community that took place after 1975, when Imam Warith Deen Mohammed succeeded his father, Elijah, as leader of the Nation of Islam. Mohammed rejected the Nation’s racist strains and founded the Muslim American Society.

“W.D. Mohammed turned the movement around by 180 degrees,” says Nyang. Yet most Americans are still not aware of the different groups within the African American Muslim community.

An estimated 30% to 40% of all U.S. Muslims are African American, and the vast majority, about 1.5 million, follow Imam W.D. Mohammed. (The total number of American Muslims is said to be anywhere from 2 million to 7 million, depending on which of widely differing surveys is used.) While the Nation of Islam keeps membership numbers private, the highest estimates are about 100,000.

If the urban poor are a priority for all African American Muslims, it’s because they are the primary constituents. These roots also help to explain why many African American Muslims feel disenfranchised from others in the faith.

“Immigrant Muslims don’t come to us for advice,” Hasan says. “They think we don’t know as much about the religion as they do.”

Ethnic tensions are not new for American Muslims. Thirty years ago, an influx of Asian Muslim immigrants, many of them professionals, discovered American Islam and were not impressed.

“For the immigrant Muslims, authority was based on knowing Arabic and Islamic law,” says Sherman Jackson, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Most African American Muslims didn’t know very much about either.”

What they did know, and immigrants from Muslim countries did not, was grass-roots politics and coalition-building outside their own religious group, Jackson says.

The Bilal Center’s Hasan and other African American leaders are stressing those skills now. “African Americans prove that Islam is not antithetical to democracy or to America,” says Imam Faheem Shuaibe, director of the predominantly African American Masjidul Waritheen in Oakland, which has about 300 members.

Shuaibe has openly challenged immigrant Muslims to show more respect for African Americans. Last fall at a national conference of the American Muslim Alliance in San Jose that was made up primarily of Middle Eastern and Arab Muslims, Shuaibe made the point that W.D. Mohammed should be referred to by his title, imam.

He says Sept. 11 “put the conversation on the table” for all American Muslims. His side of the conversation comes down to this: “When you’re presenting a message about Islam in America, don’t exclude me. African American Muslims have led the way at integrating Muslims into American society.”

At the conference, Shuaibe says, he was still smarting from an earlier situation that had upset a number of African American Muslims. During the country’s last presidential election, a coalition of American Muslims endorsed George W. Bush for president and encouraged all Muslims to vote in a bloc. Leaders from the Muslim American Society felt left out of the process.

“When those voices claimed to speak for all Muslims in America, I resented it,” says Shuaibe. “And when they claimed this was the moment for American Muslims, it irritated me. The American Muslim identity they claimed was already in place.”

After the election, coalition members claimed the bloc vote resulted in nearly three-fourths of American Muslims voting Republican, based on the group’s own surveys. General exit polls, however, showed that the vast majority of African Americans, at least 90%, voted for democratic candidate Al Gore. That rift has been smoothed out, Shuaibe says, but he wants more open communication. “We need to talk about the sensitivities. It’s important because we’re a family.”

At a recent gathering at Georgetown University, leaders from Islamic ethnic groups, including African Americans, talked about having an all-inclusive Muslim American conference once every four years, starting in 2004. “It is something like the Olympics or the World Cup,” Bukhari says of the challenges of the plan.

He compares American Muslims’ struggle toward unity to the transition American Christians and Jews went through in the 19th century, during the migrations from Europe. “Among American Muslims now, only 36% were born in the U.S. The rest are from elsewhere.”

Nyang believes time will make a difference for American Muslims, as it has for every new religious group in this country. “We have to be patient. Islam in America is very young.”

On a Saturday afternoon at the Downtown Women’s Center, a homeless shelter on Los Angeles Street, Najee Ali, director of Project Islamic HOPE, helped boil hot dogs in the kitchen.

Along with providing homeless services, his group lobbies for social and legal reforms. Two years ago Ali, 37, helped push the Sherrice Iverson Good Samaritan bill into law. It says that a witness to a sexual assault against a minor must notify police.

At least 30 homeless women attended the Saturday lunch, served on tables covered with crisp blue plastic cloths. Ali introduced himself to the group in personal terms.

“I used to live here on Skid Row,” he said. “I lost my mother at an early age, but God has blessed me, and I made a commitment to give back and help others.” His fiancee, Ngina Muhammad, 36, daughter of Imam W.D. Mohammed, worked with him that day.

Ali has been outspoken about tensions between Arab and African American Muslims, but on this day he seemed more optimistic. “We’re in the growing-pains stage,” he said. “Unity has to happen. It’s the only way for American Islam to survive.”