Abstract
This chapter is the first of three chapters in part I of this study that offers a theoretical and historical critic of the WOI theory, the dominant paradigm governing Islam in America studies. It introduces the study’s basic themes of struggle, flight, and community, and the critique of the dominant paradigm’s assertion that Islam among blacks in the United States disappeared or virtually disappeared during 1870–1930. Chapter 2 provides preliminary evidence based on original field research of the possible survival of political Islam and Islamic institutions in early Florida previously ignored by WOI theory. Chapter 3 rounds out the first half of this study by exploring important divergent perspectives. The second half of this study, beginning with chapter 4, continues to examine divergent perspectives on Islam in America but with emphasis on black Muslim attitudes and thought. Chapter 5 examines 21 cases of prominent individuals associated with blacks and political Islam with emphasis on black Muslim political behavior. Chapter 6 compares the impact of US policy on minorities including black Muslims in the United States with Muslims, overseas. Chapter 7 offers detailed conclusions.
He is the First and the Last and the Manifest and the Hidden, and He is the Knower of all things.
—Quran (57:3)
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Notes
See “Study Finds Number of Mosques Up 25% in 6 Years,” New York Times, April 27, 2001, and remarks by the president on a new beginning, at Cairo University, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6–04–09. For a discussion of statistics on the growth of Muslims in the United States based on estimates provided by the American Muslim Council and the disproportionate number of black Muslim converts to Islam in the United States see, Mboye Lo, Muslims in America: Race, Politics, and Community Building (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2004), 17, 40.
L. Carl Brown, Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 38,
Glenn E. Perry, The Middle East: Fourteen Islamic Centuries (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Publishing, 1997), and
L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain 1500–1614 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 178.
Fareed Zakaria, “And He’s Head of Intelligence?” Newsweek, October 27, 2003, 41.
John Esposito, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol.2, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 370. Also see
A. G. Noorani, Islam and Jihad (New York: Zed books, 2002), 45. For a translation of Allah al-Iskandari’s remarks on the greatest jihad see
Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 195.
See Esposito, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, 118, and A. G. Noorani, Islam and Jihad, 118, for a discussion of jihad. For discussions of mosque and state and fitnah, see Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2, 95–96.
Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Muslim Minorities and Self-Restraint in Liberal Democracies,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, vol. 29, no. 4, (June 1996), 1525.
Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Shehu Usman Dan Fodio’s Restatement of the Doctrine of Hijrah,” Islamic Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, (1986): 60.
See Yvonne Haddad, “A Century of Islam in America,” in The Muslim World Today, Occasional Paper no. 4 (Washington, DC: The Middle East Institute, 1986), 1, 2, 10.
Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 214–215.
Sulayman Nyang, Islam in the United States of America (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1999), 13.
Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 198.
Philip Jenkins, “America and Islam Go Way Back,” online version, August 25, 2003, 2, http://hnn.us/articles/1612.html
See Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 1st ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 6.
See Geneive Abdo, Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 69.
Michael A. Koszegi and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Islam in North America: A Sourcebook (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992), xi.
Gutbi Mahdi Ahmed, “Muslim Organizations in the United States,” in The Muslims of America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 22.
See John L. Esposito, “Muslim’s Place in the American Public Square,” in Muslims’ Place in the American Public Square, eds. Zahid H. Bukari, Sulayman S. Nyang, Mumtaz Ahmad, and John L. Esposito (New York: Altamira, 2004), Forward.
See Esposito, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, 280 and Yvvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jame Idleman Smith, eds., Muslim Communities in North America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), xix.
The Center for Comparative Religious Study at UCLA so designates the Los Angeles area. See Paul M. Barrett, American Islam: Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 16.
See Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12. Barrett describes Islamic conversions in the United States as “overwhelmingly African American.” See Barrett, American Islam, 9.
See Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam, dust cover / liner notes. Also see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito, eds., Muslims on the Americanization Path? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21. Haddad states that black Muslims help “reshape America from the bottom up” and “they seek the redemption of African American society.”
James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Tom Dalzell, Damn the Man: Slang of the Oppressed in America (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2010), 1, 185.
Abdelhamid Lotfi, Muslims on the Block: Five Centuries of Islam in America (Ifrane, Morocco: Al Akhawayn University Press, 2002), 26–27.
See Ali A. Mazrui, “Islam and the Black Diaspora: The Impact of Islamigration,” in The African Diaspora: African Origins of New World Identities, ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). Also see
Sherman A. Jackson, “Preliminary Reflection on Islam and Black Religion,” in Muslims’ Place in the American Public Square, ed. Zahid H. Bukari et al., (New York: Altamira Press, 2004), 201, and
Aminah B. McCloud, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.
Ishmael Reed, Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Reed states in the dust jacket of his book that “African Americans have been living under a police state, a sort of banana republic within a democracy for three hundred years.”
Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance, 25. Also see Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam, 32, and Edward Curtis IV, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Isam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 185.
Vibert White, Inside the Nation of Islam in America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 5–6.
See Alex Haley, The Playboy Interviews (New York: Ballantine Books, 1962). Also see
Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 337.
Michael Scheuer (Anonymous), Imperial Hubris (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2004).
Mattias Gardel, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 31.
See G. M. Ahmed, “Muslim Organizations in the United States,” in The Muslims of America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11–36.
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© 2013 Samory Rashid
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Rashid, S. (2013). The Hidden Transcripts. In: Black Muslims in the US. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337511_2
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