Rehashed and Remastered
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Debate on the nature of cultural appropriation is often unproductive. If you boil any culture down enough, every aspect of every modern culture is "appropriated" from somewhere else: as a wise woman once put it, "you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" When it comes to the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, this same argument applies. Yes, it is true that Islamic (adjacent) ideas clearly influenced the inception of these organizations, and these organizations attempt to garter some legitimacy through this claimed connection. The claim that these organizations are not "properly Islamic" is a moot point: the primary function of these organizations aren't to maintain a "proper, 'Eastern' Islam", they are explicitly designed to help root the cultural identity of African Americans who otherwise have had all identifiers stripped from them and replaced by White facsimiles.
This is why Islam, in the North American context, was so attractive to Black Americans and especially to Bebop musicians: it represented a radical new way of thinking about self-identification/expression that truly pandered to that specific demographic. Black people who recognized the injustices in the system they were born into craved ways to split themselves from this cancer; converting to true faith in Islam (non-White) and having true faith in Bebop (non-White) represented two ways for them to achieve this desire to some degree.
Those denouncing the customs of Black American Islam miss the point entirely. Their faith is no weaker simply for having altered traditions. The essentials are still rooted in the same place, the only difference being that the Black American faith directly serves and supports its followers in a way that "True Islam" wouldn't have the capability to. Bebop is not a heresy because it appropriates Ragtime, Swing, and the Blues, nor is Black American Islam a heresy because it appropriates aspects of Islamic thought, belief, and history.
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This is a good point and use of one of Kamala’s most valid arguments that all novel concepts come from pre-existing contexts. But I do have some questions, do you consider any act to be appropriation? And although there were Islamic cultural aspects adopted in the Moorish Science Temple, it was mostly an appropriation of religion instead of culture. If someone alters your religion’s core beliefs, although the alterations were necessary for the black liberation movement at that time, is one not valid for taking offence in them? I think there is a difference between denouncing/calling something a heresy and taking offence in some act of religious or cultural appropriation. I am not certain and there is a lot to consider, but I do think the debate on this form of appropriation can be fruitful.
