In dealing with the Lived Religion Issues among Black Americans, Khalil (2017) explicitly discusses the different features of Islamic identity in this society. He emphasizes the immense spirituality in Islamic society and the life that many Black Muslims adopted, though they were subjected to discrimination. Using Sufi expressions and the Nation of Islam as examples, Simons tells how Black Muslims are engaged with Islam not only through religion but with a way of life, providing them with spiritual practices, social activities, and self-empowerment, for Malcolm X was one of the exact cases of these figures which combined the Islamic faith with a fight for social justice and rallied up the whole community behind this vision of transforming it with the power the Islamic religion held.
There is not one monolithic image of Afro-American understanding and interpretation of Islam, but a mosaic of various entities (different groups, people), each with its independent image of the faith, according to Khalil (2017). The Nation of Islam (NOI), which has another kind of Islam and Afro-centrism infused with the social justice cause, is also noted in this group. In Detroit and Chicago, the NOI, a black Islam religious organization headed by leaders such as Elijah Muhammad and Farrakhan, respectively, has been attracting followers with its teachings that stress self-sufficiency, independence, and assertion of identity. Much out of his revolutionary style of convincing, the NOI Khalil touches upon how the movement’s teachings and the black Americans who have been the targets of system race and economic marginalization, the NOI offering them back a sense of pride and even agency. Khalil, too, talks about Black Muslim’s journeys that are formed through their African or immigrant backgrounds and also based more on mainstream Sunni and Shia religions. These people worship from diverse places of their choice- Atlanta, New York, and Houston, among others- as Islam is a religious belief that knows no borders across the human race.
Curtis (2012) says that the history of Muslims of African descent in the United States unfolded around some crucial stages and movements that led to the practice of universalism or particularism in Islamic conceptions. For instance, there is the rise of personalities like Drew Ali and Noble, who form sects like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. These movements positioned Islam as an African-American identity, frequently (if not primarily) against the mainstream narrative, defying the initial interpretations. For example, Elijah Muhammad’s teachings used to give a significant focus on reviving, empowering, and liberating African Americans besides the unrevealed separatist approach that undermined Islam’s orthodoxy.
Miller (2020) explains that Black Americans’ Muslim life has many trajectories, presenting one with the picture of a colorful mosaic of various influences and traditions. The author states that there are several sub-groups and approaches to living within the African-American Muslim community. As an illustration, there are Sufi lovers who are Mourid members of Harlem and Haqqani Naqshbandi city tradesmen in Chicago. These people find spiritual gratification through dhikr (prayer of remembrance) and get their motivation from learned Sufis’ figure of Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani. On the other hand, some reformist shaykhs that propagated the Shadhili and Chishti Sufi orders have come up. They include Shaykh Daoud Ahmed Faisal (New York) and Al-Hajj Wali Akram (Cleveland). This period in the 1970s and 1980s marked another step towards a more colorful landscape of Black American Islam, again with communities like Tijaniyyah, Qadiriyyah, and Burhaniyyah emerging, with Shaykh Hassan Cisse and Shaykh Abdullah Awadallah accomplishing this by fostering connections to Sufi orders hailing from These diverse expressions of Islam show us how the identity of a ‘black American’ is multi-faceted and a combination of on the one hand, indigenous traditions and the other hand, the global spiritual networks.
Curtis (2012) says that black Americans came to adopt Islam and consider it a powerful religion that had a central contribution in shaping it through the civil rights movement, led by Malcolm X and Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown). These advocates mixed Islam with the struggle for racial justice, yielding the Islamic ideal supporting racial justice with a universalistic outlook on the message of Islam based on justice and change. While he had expressed initial concerns about the delights and pleasures of the Western world at the beginning of his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X later realized that Islam was a diverse religion, just like the people of the world. The focus was the universal brotherhood of believers that went beyond racial lines. On the same line, the activism of Imam Jamil Al-Amin carried out in places like Atlanta, a city central to the narrative, fleshed out the intersectionality of Islam and social justice, which was all about the ongoing dialogue between universally recognized ideals and vividly exemplified problems that lay within African-American Islamic thought.
References
Curtis IV, E. E. (2012). Islam in Black America: identity, liberation, and difference in African-American Islamic thought—State University of New York Press.
Khalil, A. (2017). Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority. European Journal of American Studies. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11683
Miller, Dr. R. (2020). Black American Sufi – A History. Public Scholarship on Religion.
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