Black Muslims seek acceptance from fellow Americans, adherents

NEW YORK — Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid tells the story of a young African-American Muslim who was asked what it's like living in post-Sept. 11 America.

"It's like being black," he quotes him as saying. "Twice."

The line invariably gets laughs. But it produces a positive roar of appreciation here in the oldest Orthodox Muslim congregation in Harlem, in a makeshift mosque reclaimed almost 25 years ago from a junkies' shooting gallery and now called "The Great Pyramid" after the Egyptian-granite pillars out front.

If there is an American iteration of Islam — and worshipers here insist there is — the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood on the corner of 113th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue is it. This thriving, mostly African-American congregation is a place where Islam has no foreign accent, and where notions of Islam vs. the West lose all buoyancy against a backdrop of Boy Scout meetings, breast-cancer fund-raisers and programs to combat AIDS and homelessness.

The faith of slaves

Members of this congregation, founded in the 1960s by followers of Malcolm X after he left the black-separatist Nation of Islam, will tell you that Islam is as indigenous to America as the arrival 400 years ago of African slaves, many of whom prayed five times a day to Allah.

Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid: "We who have served in the armies of America as Muslim African-Americans since the American Revolution are not at odds with the West. We are the West."

"We who have served in the armies of America as Muslim African-Americans since the American Revolution are not at odds with the West," says Abdur-Rashid, the congregation's genial, 53-year-old leader. "We are the West."

For these worshipers, it's been a source of bitterness to find themselves marginalized yet again after Sept. 11, 2001, this time for reasons unrelated to blackness. Many say they are stunned to find they are treated as something less than authentic, not just by the dominant American society but often by new Muslim arrivals from South Asia and Arab countries as well. They joke that they have gone from the back of the bus to the back of the camel.

"As Ralph Ellison would say, we are the invisible Muslims in this country," says Amir al-Islam, a professor of Islamic Studies at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. "Our betweenness puts us in a precarious position. We are the single largest Muslim community in America, and we have been practicing Orthodox Islam for decades. Yet the media often relegates us to the margins. And Muslim organizations from the immigrant community often view us as new Muslims who are seen as not proficient in the Islamic canons and, therefore, lacking in authenticity."

A cluster of communities

The terrorist attacks cast a spotlight on the American Muslim community and in many ways underscored how it is not a single community at all, but rather a community of communities — with neither the whole nor its parts fully formed. And while Islam itself is colorblind, the divide between African-American Muslims — a third of all American Muslims — and immigrants from South Asia and the Arab world has been significant.

"The issues are more complex than simply immigrant versus indigenous Muslims," insists Agha Saeed of Berkeley, Calif., the Pakistan-born chairman of the American Muslim Task Force, a group attempting to build coalitions across ethnic groups.

"People from the Middle East alone come from 22 different countries. People from South Asia come from different countries. So we are not simply talking about four or five or even 20 groups of people. We are trying to reconcile many different experiences of history and many different conceptions of destiny, when we try to talk about where we came from, who we are and where we want to go. And that takes time."

Mistaken notions

Those efforts were hobbled in the past by the mistaken notion that most African-American Muslims were followers of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In fact, only a few thousand of the estimated 2 million African-American Muslims in America today belong to the racial-separatist Nation.

Then, there is the stereotype that since some African-American men encounter Islam in prison that all black Muslims are criminals.

"I have never been in prison except in my work as a chaplain," says Abdur-Rashid. "And I have people in leadership in my mosque who are college professors, and I also have people who are ex-offenders."

But there are other tensions, too: Until Sept. 11, the immigrant Muslim communities often focused on striving and advancing in their adopted country — as have many newcomers before them — rather than on the issues of jobs, education and health care that preoccupy many of their African-American brethren.

"In their pursuit of the American dream and whiteness, the new arrivals have largely ignored African-American Muslims, and have assumed that they can impose their own understanding of Islam on African-Americans," African-American Islamic scholar Aminah Beverly McCloud said at a conference last year.

By the same token, she said, African Americans feel their own engagement with Islam qualifies them to define Islam in America.

The history of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood is in many ways illustrative. Many here see Islam not just as a path to salvation but also as a social-action program and an authentic expression of black American identity.

Coming of age

With his deep roots in the black protest movements of the 1960s, Abdur-Rashid's story is typical: Born a Baptist in Greensboro, N.C., and coming of age in the South Bronx in the tumult of the 1960s, "I was heavily influenced by pan-Africanism, by black nationalism, by the antiwar movement, all of it," he says.

"And then, I became a Muslim at age 20. And it played a great role in my grasp of the social-justice dimension of Islam."

In his sermons, Abdur-Rashid stresses the lost Islamic heritage of the slaves brought to America.

"We, the indigenous Muslims of America, particularly the African Americans, are still waking up from a 400-year coma," he told worshipers in a recent Friday service, exhorting them to expand their knowledge of Islam.

"Many of the people kidnapped to this country and sold into slavery were already Muslims," he said. "And then, we suffered psychic and blunt-force trauma to the head, and forgot everything, including who we are and what we are. We were told, 'Your name is not Ahmed, your name is Charlie. You don't worship Allah. You worship Jesus.'

"But this could not erase the genetic code.

" ... So lo and behold, 400 years later ... our historical memory as Muslims is being rebooted."

Different perspectives

Some African-American Muslims acknowledge that a more recent historical memory of the black fight for equal rights also intrudes on their relationship with immigrant Muslims, many of whom are ignorant of that history.

"If a group of immigrant brothers were sitting around the table right now, they would probably say, 'Brother, there's no racism in Islam,' " al-Islam says. "They would say we're overly sensitive. And maybe we are.

"But when we who have been victims of racism for so long feel in any way slighted, we feel it's racist because it's such a familiar response."

A major perceived slight was the so-called Muslim endorsement of George W. Bush four years ago — without any African-American input. "It was deeply polarizing," Abdur-Rashid says. "Not because a group of Muslims decided to vote Republican, but because of the way they went about it. There was no consultation whatsoever with those of us who have any history in this land. And then, to project their collective decision as representative of all Muslims in America was an insult."

Things have been moving in a different direction since Sept. 11 as Muslim communities across the ethnic spectrum are united by a sense of being under siege.

"When Amadou Diallo was shot by police, immigrant groups said, 'Well, that's a shame,' but they didn't make a big deal about it," says Abdur-Rashid, referring to the mistaken killing of an African immigrant by four New York police officers in 1999. "Some of them didn't even understand profiling. But since Sept. 11, every Muslim understands it."

One sign of a new determination to build bridges was the dramatically broadened Muslim coalition formed earlier this year to make a presidential endorsement. "There was a great deal of outreach to African-Americans, and it helped heal a wounded relationship," says Abdur-Rashid, who participated in the process.

Yet he believes there is still a long way to go.

In his tiny, whitewashed office with books arranged in neat piles on the floor, he talks about researching a history of Islam in America from pre-Columbian times to the post-Sept. 11 world, tentatively titled "Reclaimed Legacy."

Islam, American-style

The more he studies, he says, the more he sees the African-American Muslim experience as a particularly American iteration — no less authentic than any other expression of Islam around the world.

"Not only were there African Muslims who were here in America as explorers before Christopher Columbus, but a third of the African slaves who were brought here during the slave trade were Muslims," he says.

But he believes that African-Americans themselves must reclaim that history to practice self-determination.

He opens a closet door and points to a half dozen traditional, flowing Arab robes wrapped in plastic in the back. "You see those?" he says, pointing. "I stopped wearing them about five years ago. Why? They don't express who I am."

Instead, he wears a simple charcoal wool tunic — "an original" designed by a member of this mosque 30 years ago.

"This is part of an effort on my part to model something different culturally," he says. "Something that's not Arab. Because I'm not Arab. And I don't believe I have to look like one, dress like one or sound like one to be an authentic Muslim."