‘‘The very nature of the black man is a Muslim’’
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Since the fifteenth century, Islam has played a crucial role in shaping racialized identities for people in Black and Immigrant America within the context of a Christian nation. Early in America's colonial endeavours, a racial hierarchy, where religion served as a defining marker, emerged among African slaves. Rana notes, "Muslim slaves were identified using such racial terms as 'overly tanned' and 'Moor,' giving an Arab valence to their Africanness (Rana 40).
In the early twentieth century, Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple, in an effort to disregard the concept of biological race, began identifying themselves with the term "Moorish American," instead of aligning themselves with enslaved Africans in an effort to reduce the amount of discrimination and prejudice they endured. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Ahmadiyya movement and the Nation of Islam attempted to also remove themselves from the understanding of biological race through Muslim unity and religious, rather than racial, identity. Despite the fact that followers of the Moorish Science Temple, the Ahmadiyya movement, and the Nation of Islam "remained trapped in the early-twentieth-century logic of race, which would not allow them to transpose their blackness," identifying as a Muslim offered an alternative to identifying as Black - and in some cases, even lead to full American citizenship (Rana 41).
For African Americans, "identifying with an alternative religion to Christianity has represented a threat to 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. Further, claiming Muslim identity interfered with the established formation that saw race as a continuum but as a polarity between black and white" (Rana 42). For Black Americans, identifying as Muslim provided an alternative to being solely categorized as Black within White America, allowing them to assert their identity on their own terms.
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The main argument Rana makes in his first chapter is about the use of the term Muslim as an umbrella term that regroups both religious, cultural, and racial stereotypes. In turn, this has led to the collective vulnerability of all those perceived as Muslims. It has also made Islamophobia a type of racism because its manifestations cannot seem to be separated from physical attributes.
I thought your comment was very interesting because I interpreted the “disregard the concept of biological race” as a strive to seem as “white” as possible. In other words, the seeking of privilege. Rana describes this in two ways. A Syrian man wishing to be viewed as white rather than Arab. This is the status Jewish people were “awarded” at the time. However the Syrian nationality and the Arab world was seen as a direct opposition to the West therefore could not be seen as belonging to the white nationality.
The second example, which is the one you discuss, is that of the black person wanting to be seen as Arab and therefore associating with the Moore and Muslim identity. The reasons they want to be seen as white or not black it to access more privilege in America.The Second example felt odd to me because of the representation of Islam in the media. My initial thought process was if one is already being persecuted for being black, why would they also want to be persecuted for their religion. It felt like using religion as a means to move up the “race” ladder. This is why I really enjoyed your last point about allowing them to assert their identity in their own terms. The nuance of the black man’s identity reaching religions other than Christianity, in theory, halts the binary of race in America. I say in theory because sadly, and ultimately, the identity of a minority remains controlled by the collective white mind.