Over the past decade, I have had the following questions posed to me numerous times by individuals within the American Muslim community:
“Why talk about Blackness within Islam?”
“Isn’t Islam colorblind?”
“Doesn’t specifying Blackness as Muslims a type of ‘asabiyyah (tribalism) which is counter to Islamic teachings?”
Likewise, I have frequently heard the following questions and declarative statements from non-Muslim Pan-Africanists:
“How can you have allegiance to the religion of Arabs which treats Black folks as second-class Muslims?”
“African people in America have traded in one slave-master’s religion, Christianity, for another slave-master’s religion, Islam.”
Blackness And Islam is my attempt to affirmatively reply to such questions and critiques, which come both from within and without the Muslim community.
The Problem of anti-Black racism
In the foreword of Blackness And Islam, Dr. Rudolph Bilal Ware (may Allah preserve him) writes:
Anti-Black Racism is among the most serious challenges the American Muslim community faces. Indeed, the global Ummah has yet to address in a serious and throughgoing way the emergence of virulent forms of anti-Black racism in the past few centuries…Speaking as an African-American Muslim, I can attest through personal experience the lack of self-critical consciousness of the Muslim world’s recent problematic histories regarding [how] racial slavery plays a central role in shaping race-thinking in contemporary Muslim America.
As Dr. Ware asserts, both here and elsewhere, in order to correct imbalances and address the benign neglect of an issue, we must give attention to that which has been marginalized.
In this particular case, part of the remedy of addressing anti-Blackness is to shine light on positive frameworks and personalities within Blackness per sound Islamic tradition. To ignore the issue, or feign color-blindness in Muslim community (much less the world), is not part of the solution, but rather part of the problem.
Rooting our Activism within the Spiritual Tradition
However, if we discuss issues of anti-Black racism within the Muslim community without being centered in our Islamic spiritual tradition, we may also bring forth or exasperate other problematic issues.
Imam Dawud discusses what an Islamic approach to anti-racist activism entails, with the poet Baraka Blue
As Muslims, we must always strive to connect our activism to Islam, iman, & ihsan. While we can certainly learn from other approaches, we must also recognize that surface-level approaches to anti-racist activism will always be deficient.
I often remind Muslims that spiritual remedies for the disease of racism must come from within the spiritual tradition. I discuss this issue in more depth in Towards Sacred Activism.
Responding to Misconceptions among Pan-Africanist & Black Orientalist Thinkers
Regarding non-Muslim Pan Africanists and (Black) Orientalists who put forth the notion that Islam is inherently anti-Black, one of the goals of Blackness And Islam is to debunk their misconceptions, particularly as they relate to the earliest generations of Muslims.
The first misconception which these thinkers often promulgate is the idea that fourteen centuries ago in Arabia, Blackness and Arabness were somehow mutually exclusive identities. The reality is that though Arabs of that time had a range of skin colors and hair textures, they were predominately brown to dark brown in skin tone with kinky hair. In fact, the Arabs of that time saw themselves to be quasi-Blacks, and closer in civilization proximity to Abyssinians than to Romans and Persians. The Arabs of the Prophetic era considered the latter two groups to be foreigners and the white people, literally “red” (ahmar) people.
The second common misconception among Pan-Africanist & Black Orientalist thinkers, is that Abyssinian and Nubian Muslims in the generation of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ were primarily of a low status in the early Muslim society, and that most of them were enslaved.
Imam Dawud discusses the fact that Blackness & Arabness were not mutually exclusive categories in the Prophetic period
The reality is that many Black Muslims of the Prophetic era occupied high societal positions. Furthermore, a significant percentage of early Black Muslims were never enslaved, such as the Abyssinian emperor al-Najashi’s relatives Abu Niyzar and Dhu Mikhbar (may Allah be pleased with them) who migrated to al-Madinah. Abyssinian Muslims were not a slave-class of Muslims in the first generation.
The third common misconception among these thinkers is the notion that the Arabs of the Prophetic era viewed all Black people from what we know today as the African continent as belonging to the same category. The reality is that Arabs viewed Egyptians, Nubians, Abyssinians, and the Zanj, so-called Bantu East Africans, as distinct peoples with unique identities.
As a result of this third misconception, many narrations, ranging from spurious ahadith to statements by scholars after the first three generations about the Zanj, are misinterpreted by Pan Africanists as referring to all Black people at that time. When viewed within their proper context, however, we see that these were not general statements, but rather specific statements on specific issues..
For instance, Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal (may Allah’s mercy be upon him), who was described as intensely dark in skin color and would be seen as a Black Arab today, is attributed to have made statements about the Zanj. When we understand what the term Zanj meant in his context, we realize that these statements were not anti-Black per se, but rather that his reported opinion about the Zanj pertaining to marriage fits within a particular socio-political context.
The Importance of Knowledge of Our Tradition & Our History
Imam Ali (may Allah ennoble his countenance) reportedly said, “People are adversaries to what they are ignorant of.”
Blackness and Islam was published in 2021 by Algorithm, and is distributed in North America & Oceania by Imam Ghazali Institute.
If we are to live Islam with the social integrity and unity that the Qur’an and Sunnah bid us to do, as well as defend the honor of Islam from those who lob intellectual bombs against our faith, we need knowledge.
Sound knowledge of our tradition & our history will help us to remedy our trauma, improve our behavior, and also to rebut skewed claims, especially in the African American community.
Blackness And Islam is an attempt to spread this beneficial knowledge, to help us in these noble endeavors.
Imam Dawud Walid is Executive Director of Cair-Michigan, and teaches in communities within greater Detroit, around the USA, and beyond. Blackness and Islam is his third book.
The above is a guest submission and reflects the views of the author.