Why would "Muslim" be a liberatory identity for African-Americans?
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In “Terrifying Muslims,” Junaid Rana explains that identifying as ‘Moorish Americans’ was a means for enslaved Black Americans to attempt to “shift from racial identification to ethnic and religious identification that, they hoped, would shield them from discrimination and prejudice.” (Rana 40) Indeed, Islam has been used as a form of resistance since the earliest era of the transatlantic slave trade.
The very first Muslims on the North American continent were the men, women and children violently uprooted and sold into bondage at the hands of white powers. The Triangular Trade kept West African Muslims from maintaining their traditions, keeping their names, and disseminating their wisdom while forcing them to work within a system that did not allow them to know who they were. Nonetheless, for many, the sadistic conditions were not enough to drive them to forget what they had spent a lifetime memorizing and reciting. Abdel-Rahman Ibrahima, for instance, an emir from Futa Jallon, Guinea, was kidnapped during a military campaign and subsequently shipped across the second largest ocean in the world. Ibrahima told every man he met that he was a prince in his homeland and presented himself as a very educated individual. Thus, his ‘master’ positioned him as a foreman, a position of relative power that allowed him to regulate, plan and bookkeep. Similarly to Bald’s discovery of Black Southern men who performed as ‘Orientals’ to access better mobile and economic opportunities, Ibrahima used his Islamic education to access a position he could not otherwise have occupied.
Furthermore, given the promise he showed and his ability to write Arabic, the former emir was ordered to translate Christian scriptures into Arabic in order to spread Christianity among enslaved individuals. Instead, Ibrahima wrote the Fatiha! He used this opportunity as intellectual resistance to keep his identity alive in a context where he was made to forget. By accepting this mission, Ibrahima also benefited by being allowed to travel to spread the faith, meet people in positions of higher power and try his best to return home.
In the 1930s, economic displacement caused by both the Great Depression & Migration “formed the context for the success of Islam among African Americans” (Rana 41) who critiqued the practice of Christianity in the context of American plantation slavery that was still fresh in the collective memory. Not only did this movement separate Black Americans from the ‘master’s’ culture to reclaim their some part of their identity (since the first Muslims on the continent were Black Muslims in the 1500s), but it threatened “the idea of American exceptionalism, and Islam, specifically, has threatened the maintenance of a U.S. racial and religious order based on the idea of white Christian supremacy.” (Rana 42)
Unfortunately, African Americans identifying with Islam made the grave miscalculation of failing to account for white Christian America’s enduring hostility towards Islam. As we learned last week, “black people are always already marked as different/deviant/ dangerous.” (Yancy 4) Now, not only did Muslim Americans live under the negative cloud of association related to black people, but their villainization was exacerbated by the Oriental propaganda that is part of the American imagination.