Final Paper
The control of narrative and manipulation of history has endured time itself. The
narratives of great movements and revolutions have been controlled over time to make them
palatable and avoid complications, but in doing so denied and revoked the raw truth of history.
Take, for instance, the history of African Americans, Ida Wells was nearly erased from history
despites of her exemplary work in anti-lynching. Unfortunately, erasure is not unique to Ida
Wells, and far more heroes and gallant knights have been erased and denied in history for the
seek of making history palatable and avoiding complicated characters. The unfairness of history
to the struggling men of Islam and their influence in the US history, the civil rights movement,
and the black community, the truth about Islamic attractiveness to African Americans and how
its values are transformative to Black people; and how the impact of Islam had fallen victim to
the erasure of history for the seek of making history palatable due to the imagery of Islam today
and Islamophobia.
The origin of Islam in the USA history is misinstructed and inaccurate to a large extent.
The small literature available on Islam history in the United States is mainly defined into two
types of Muslims. First immigrant Muslims and indigenous Muslims. This distinction already
violates the basic principle of Islam. Islam does not recognize distinction based on locale and
erases borderline. Islam rather believes in brother and sisterhood which is purely based on
accepting Allah as the only God of all things. This demonstrates the lack of understanding, the
inaccuracies of Islam history, and its impact on the United States. Samory Rashid, the author of
the article Islamic Influence in American: Struggles, Flight, Community, criticizes the literature
available on Islam and its influence on the united states. He says “Yet beyond Farrakhan and the
NOI the absence of detailed discussions of African American Muslims and their prominent role
in the introduction and spread of Islam in the Americas still characterizes most mainstream
accounts of Islam in the US. As it now stands, about the only way to learn about African
American Muslims is by exploring the subject as a marginal component of minority or black
studies rather than as part of mainstream Islamic or for that matter American studies”(23). This is
a result of erasure and avoidance of the truth because of its complexity and image of today. The
need to make history palatable is unethical and unfair to people who have died for a worthy
cause. For instance Malcolm X, all Muslims, and the people who are seeking the truth.
Moreover, It can be seen that Islam dates way back to slavery, as is shown in the biography of
Omar Ibn Said a Muslim slave, who says “We sailed in the big Sea for a month and a half until
we came to a place called Charleston. And in a Christian language, they sold me. A weak, small,
evil man called Johnson, an infidel (Kafir) who did not fear Allah at all, bought me (Said 18).
Islam existed from the beginning and throughout US history as some of the slaves originating
from west Africa were Muslims.
The attractiveness of Islamic values to African Americans is embedded in the struggles
and history of Black people. The rise of Islam within prisons and the black community has been
evident since the rise of Elijah Muhammed. The Islamic perspective of racism is the main factor
in its attractiveness as Islam transcends all race differences. All are equal in the sight of Allah.
This is well illustrated in the prayer as all Muslims perform sajdah (prostration) to Allah
regardless of one's status. The poor, the wealthy, the black, and the white serve the same lord
(Allah). Allah says in the Quran, “O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a
female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may ˹get to˺ know one another. Surely
the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. Allah is truly
All-Knowing, All-Aware”(49:13). In another ayyah ( verse ) Allah says, “From Allah we come,
and to Allah we shall return”(2:156). These two verses lay the principle of equality among
humans and that the determinant of status is righteousness. The African Americans' struggles in
the United States were always racial and they have endured the belittlement of Whites as they
were slaved and made inferior to Whites, Segregated from society, deprived of rights, and
oppressed. When Islam came to light in the 1950s, Islam disputed all the ideology that White
people imposed on the Black people, hence the growing conversion to Islam within the Black
communities. Furthermore, Islam manifested in the Black communities through different leaders,
for instance, Elijah Mohammed and Malcolm X. Malcolm X is a great example of how Islamic
ideology transformed his life to becoming a great leader within the African American
community. Malcolm in his early life was committing crimes such as burglaries and was sent to
prison for his crimes. It was in prison where he hit rock bottom and then had found his Islamic
faith. He found a sense of pride in his religion as he refused to eat pork and demanded the prison
accommodate his Muslim diet. It was in prison that he started spreading the message and
recruiting for the nation of Islam (NOI), which was founded by Elijah Muhammed. In the article,
Islam and Black America: the Religious Life of Malcolm X, they highlight Malcolm’s Journey
and it says, Malcolm said “I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man’s society
when soon now, in prison, I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed
my life”(Ahmed, pp 457). It was after embarking on his Islamic study journey that he started he
committed his life to help the Black people and uniting them. After his release from prison, he
went to continue his work with the NOI, but after joining he was not impressed with the
passiveness and lack of recruitment with the organization and climbed through ranks until he was
named a minister of the NOI. However, it was clear that Malcolm methodically did not align
with Elijah Muhammed. Elijah Muhammed’s approach was passive and did not want to be
involved in politics, while Malcolm X’s approach was more aggressive and more politically
involved. Malcolm could not stand as his people were been treated unjustly. At the beginning,
Malcolm X was anti-White and believed that they were the devil. He says, “In the Name of
Allah, the Great God of All the Worlds who came all the way here to hell just to free His long
lost people from the clutches of the devil. And in the Name of His Messenger, who is teaching us
that the white man is the devil and that America is hell” (Ahmed, pp 462). In Islamic view, this
statement is wrong and problematic because he refers to Elijah as a messenger of Allah, which is
not true. The last messenger was indeed the prophet Mohammed (SAW), and the anti-White is
also extreme as there are some believers amongst the White and they cannot be referred to as the
devil. However, after his trip to Africa and Saudi Arabia, he realizes his mistakes and he converts
to Sunni. However, his departure from NOI was justified, as his methodology conflicted with
Elijah's. Malcolm’s first criticism of Elijah was not encouraging his followers to study the Quran
and travel to the Muslim world. Malcolm was in realization of the importance of knowledge,
especially religious knowledge. In Islam, the Quran is the book of guidance. If the Quran was
only meant to be understood by the leaders, it will create unnecessary dependency upon leaders,
and this leads to disaster, and the Quran itself warns about the exclusivity of knowledge, rather
Islam encourages seeking knowledge of all kinds. Malcolm’s progression in Islam became a test
of it’s own as his loyalty to Elijah was tested. It is important to mention how transformative the
Quran is and this can be seen with Malcolm and how he acted after leaving the NOI. He
disagreed but never showed ingratitude towards Elijah. Malcolm remained grateful to Elijah, but
could not compromise the truth or his values. This lesson of priority and balance of emotions is
drawn from the story of Abraham in the Quran when he is dealing with his father and calling him
to believe. The second criticism was Elijah's passivism in the face of oppression. However,
Malcolm understood Islam requires mankind to be just in all its affairs whether it be business,
politics, or all interaction with mankind. Malcolm could not stand idle while his people were
being oppressed by Whites. He took the responsibility to speak up against the oppressors, and be
courageous in the face of power. The impact of Malcolm X in Black lives is undeniable, his
calling to Islam and fighting for his people was his mission, and to attempt to distinct between
his faith and political aspiration is unfair. Ahamed draws from Malcolm's lecture at UC Berkeley
and says, “As far as Malcolm was concerned, his Muslim faith and identity were inseparable
from his public vocation as both evangelist (like Billy Graham) and political persona (like a
Kennedy), even in a context defined as strictly secular. As Malcolm put it, inviting a Muslim
minister but denying him his religious point of view was ‘like telling a bird to fly without his
wings. Or a racehorse to run without his legs’ (X 1963a). That his wings were given to him by
Islam was a fact that Malcolm never did forget” (pp 467). Islam’s impact on Black communities
has been erased from history in order to avoid the image Islam carries today in the United States.
When you turn on the news, you will witness terrorism virtually every day, all around the
world. When you hear the word "terrorist" nowadays, you will almost certainly hear the word
Islamophobia. The media has done an excellent job of linking terrorist acts to Islam. Though
some media outlets purposefully framed Islamic coverage in a positive light to combat
Islamophobia, many have fuelled the notion that Islam poses a danger to Western culture and
that Muslims are not what members of Western society should be. This notion of discrimination
has been ingrained into the roots of society to the point that now uprooting those ideas seems to
be nugatory. In Andrew Cummins's words, “Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, and
used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”
Is the media capable of eradicating the impact Islam has had on the Black people throughout
history? consider the term "race" in the context of a world that is increasingly cognizant of the
value of words and the mental short circuits they can create for either positive learning or
negative prejudice. “Reading Islam as Black history can do the important work of challenging
white supremacist narratives that perpetuate monolithic notions of Black humanity.”(Curtis IV).
This highlights the fact that white racist narratives that belittle the ideas of Black humanity as a
whole can get challenged just by accepting Islam as black history. Is this not a reason good
enough for the history of Islam and its’ impact on black people as a whole to be studied?
Islamophobia and anti-black racism aren’t two different things unfolding on different tracks; they
were and are entwined by a cognate source and similar goals. In the book American
Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, highlights how allegations of
Mohammad Ali’s funeral being whitewashed were widespread. The book highlights how the
greatest Muslim American in history who was remembered for his unrelenting assault on racism
and his in-ring feats faced the same erasure that hovered over black Muslims since the earliest
stages of this country’s history (Beydoun 154). This erasure renders our communities more
vulnerable. If white supremacy can get to the point where it topples the identity of a man’s honor
like Ali, it seems evident enough to me what a common man will go through in a white man’s
abode.
Muslim identity has been vilified and tarnished in the same way that black identity has
been and continues to be since 9/11. There has been this notion that discrimination has subsided
but it seems nothing has changed. After Trump issued a ban on several Muslim-majority
countries, individuals from those countries were profiled and detained (Beydoun 171). In the
aftermath of the Muslim ban, the erasure of black Muslims was once again on full show in the
media. White supremacists indulge in black Muslims erasure because of how powerful they can
become with the teachings of Islam and with the background of their black culture as a whole.
For instance, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X both were considered to be the most powerful
African American Muslims who advocated for the equal rights of their community. Just being
black in America today can be a difficult, being a Muslim on top of that is far worst because the
intersectionality with that identity of African American Muslim.
Reference
Ahmed, Adil. “Islam and Black America: The Religious Life of Malcolm X.” Journal of African
American Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 2020, pp. 456–481.,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-020-09492-5.
Rashid, Samory. “Islamic Influence in America: Struggle, Flight, Community.” Journal of Muslim
Minority Affairs, vol. 19, no. 1, 1999, pp. 7–31., https://doi.org/10.1080/13602009908716422.
Said, Omar ibn, and Ala A. Alryyes. A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
IV, Edward E. Curtis. “Black History, Islam, and the Future of the Humanities beyond White
Supremacy.” Franklin Humanities Institute, Franklin Humanities Institute, 23 Nov. 2018,
https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/black-history-islam-future-humanities-beyond-white-suprem
acy
Beydoun, Khaled A.. American Islamophobia : Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear,
University of California Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=
5231234.
“The Noble Quran.” Quran.com, https://quran.com/.