I recently stumbled on this blog which I must say has a whole bunch of thought-provoking posts and provides much-needed insight into the Black Muslim community.
Below are excerpts from a popular post:
Taking the lead in a resurgence of civil rights activism is a tightly-knit coalition of Black radio personalities (Micheal Basden, Warren Ballentine, and Sharpton himself) and church leaders, who’ve been raising public awareness for the past year about these disturbing incidents.
And then a question occurred to me: How is it that pork chop, chittlin-eating preachers were able to corner the market on civil rights struggle, and how did a religion that teaches its followers to “turn the other cheek” and “love those who spitefully use you” become identified as a viable force for racial and justice in this country? At the same time we the Muslims, inheritors of a pure scripture which commands the doing of justice in the here-and-now, are left totally out of the picture.
After twenty years of the immigrants’ controlling the Islamic agenda in America, by the year 2000 Blackamericans had clearly taken the “back seat” when it came to community issues. Having taken up this knotty and controversial question of why “Blackamerican Muslims don’t stand for justice”, we’ve learned that one of the most important factors in our failure to develop and maintain a community activist, social justice tradition has been the overwhelming dominance and influence of the immigrant Muslim community.
However after having looked at this issue from all angles, its also becoming clear to me that immigrant dominance does not fully explain why Blackamerican Muslims don’t stand for justice. The record reflects that the immigrant organizations’ power-play for control of the “Islamic” agenda in America met little to no resistance from Blackamerican Muslims. The question then is why.
It was certainly expected that in attempting to explore this question we would invite the usual criticisms that always tend to impede any type of serious and frank discussion of Black community issues, especially when viewed in the context of Islam’s universality. Unfortunately, in the minds of some confused individuals “Blackamerican progress” and Islam are mutually exclusive thoughts. Because of the ‘teachings’ of the past decade or so from certain imams and du’aat - even Blackamerican ones - we now see that any talk of Blackamerican Muslims showing concern for their own community immediately provokes shrill accusations of “nationalism” or of “dividing the Muslim community”.
And what is so tragically ironic about it all is that at the same time these people raise the ugly specter of “nationalism” - being unable to advance even a cogent definition of the term - they will in the same breath utter the completely absurd statement of “I’m not Black, I’m not African American. I’M JUST MUSLIM”. However they are not able sustain the delusion of being a racial and ethnic tabula rasa (blank slate) for very long, and waste no time reinventing themselves into the mirror image of a Saudi, Sudani, Pakistani, or what have you.
Before you rush to make a judgment, take a deep breath and go through some more posts on the blog and the blogroll to really get an idea of what our brothers are going through.
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