African American and Immigrant Muslim Interaction: Past, Present and Future

With the exception of the dozen days of the Hajj season and the convergence of millions of pilgrims in Mecca, the United States is perhaps the most diverse Muslim community on Earth and certainly the most sustained, quotidian population. Immigrants from every conceivable country have traveled to America, bringing their cuisines, languages, sectarian denominations, and cultures, refracted through the prism of Islam. And yet, unique to the Muslim experience, immigrants from across the traditional Islamic world arrived in a country that had a preexisting Muslim heritage, ethos, and identity. The African American Muslim community predates the critical mass of immigrant Muslims by several decades; however, the encounter of these two communities has been and continues to be a work in progress. As immigrants sought to integrate with American society, the process of intrareligious integration has been a slow, arduous, even contentious one. Issues of race, racism, racialization, as well as ethnic and cultural divides, socioeconomic and class disparities, and doctrinal differences have militated against coalescence around a commonly subscribed religious identity.

Controversies over authenticity, authority, and agency within American Muslim communities and institutions have affected and even defined the tectonic plates that exist between the African American and immigrant Muslim groups. And while the communities have tried to develop a modus vivendi, they have done so within the context of a rather fluid sociocultural and political landscape in the United States, with such national events as the 9/11 attacks playing a major role in how the communities recalibrate their relationship with one another. As America undergoes its own demographic metamorphosis toward becoming a majority-minority nation, the construction of an American Muslim identity is underway and reflecting the existing level of engagement between the Muslim subgroups. At the same time, increased interaction is creating new modes of cooperation and understanding for a community coming to terms with its complex history and set of experiences, both individually and shared.

Voluntary migration of Muslims, though originating in the nineteenth century, achieved a measurable quantity in the early part of the twentieth century. Some of the earliest waves of Muslim migrants came from the declining Ottoman Empire, especially from the Balkans and the Arab provinces. By the 1920s, Detroit had considerable Albanian and Arab populations, the latter arriving from the Levant. By the 1930s, other cities joined Detroit as destinations for Muslims, including such Midwestern locales as Toledo, Ohio; Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Michigan City, Indiana. Other communities formed in Quincy, Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington, and even Ross, North Dakota.

While most Muslim migrants were engaged in commercial vocations, some came to the United States as missionaries. Inayat Khan introduced Sufi Islam to audiences in New York as well as San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Ahmadiyya movement facilitated many of the early encounters between the African American and immigrant communities in America. While facing backlash in British India as an Islamic heresy, the Ahmadiyya embarked on an ambitious missionary program overseas, including in the United States. An early venue for their efforts was Chicago, where Mohammad Sadiq established the headquarters for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in 1921 and the Wabash (Al Sadiq) Mosque in 1922.

Increased Muslim immigration during the middle of the twentieth century led to the establishment of new organizations, ostensibly to address the needs of the new arrivals. The Federation of Islamic Association, founded in 1952, was the principal immigrant Muslim organization in the 1950s and 1960s. Its founder was Abdullah Igram, a second-generation Arab-American, who had served as an officer in World War II. Formerly the International Muslim Society, the Federation of Islamic Association held its first annual convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, drawing 400 attendees from the United States as well as Canada. These gatherings served the primary purpose of fostering a sense of community and identity reinforcement for immigrants. While catering primarily to second-generation Muslim Americans, several African American Muslims were members and conference attendees through the years (GhaneaBassiri 2010:239).

The Muslim Students Association began in 1963 as a college-based organization catering mostly to immigrant students who were either in the country for their studies or had plans to remain after graduation. Given the paucity of African American students matriculating in the universities where Muslim Students Association branches existed, there was little interaction on campus between the two groups of Muslims. There was, however, some level of engagement in areas where immigrant students lived close to Nation of Islam centers. Elijah Muhammad had been in contact with some immigrants, as friends and teachers of Arabic and Islam to his followers. When needed, he also employed these students to serve as spokespeople or conduits to other Muslims, where apprehension to interaction ran high.

The Hanafi Madhab Center is another example of an African American Muslim organization that had connections to immigrant Muslims. Headed by Hammas Abdul Khalis, the former national secretary for the Nation of Islam but who left the Nation in 1958, came into contact with and under the influence of a scholar from East Pakistan (Bangladesh), who taught Abdul Khalis the fundamentals of orthodox Islam. This evolution from black nationalist/liberation theology movements to mainstream Islamic doctrine was a developing process in the 1960s that increased as a function of greater exposure to and interaction with immigrant Muslims.

Formed in the early 1960s, the Dar ul Islam became the largest indigenous Sunni group by 1975. Imam Yahya Abdul Kareem met Maqbool Elahi, a Pakistani who held classes on Islam in New York City. Elahi greatly influenced Abdul Kareem and, consequently, the doctrinal trajectory of the Dar ul Islam. With the added influence of Fazlur Rahman Ansari and his focus on Sufism as a teacher while visiting Pakistan, Abdul Kareem “merged” the Dar ul Islam with the International Jamaat al-Ghuraba, a Sufi association, led by Pakistani Shaykh Mubarak Ali Jamil al-Hashmi. Another key influence on the Dar ul Islam was the Muslim intellectual, Abu A’la Mawdudi, whose anticolonial ideology and focus gained great currency between Abdul Kareem and his congregants.

While African American organizations have undergone transformations due to their exposure to immigrant Muslims and their expressions of Islam, such changes have also occurred within specific institutions. The Masjid al-Mutkabir was the Poughkeepsie, the New York branch of the Nation of Islam, led by Minister Mark X in 1975. As the immigrant Muslim population of the Hudson Valley area increased, especially with its Mid Hudson Islamic Association, the Masjid embarked on a transition toward mainstream Islam. Despite this development, however, major differences still persist between the African American and immigrant Muslim communities, as ethnic difference, disparate income levels, and education standards as well as occupations create chasms and cliques.

The early influx of Muslims immigrants in the twentieth century was a motley assortment of students, seamen, traders, and even stowaways (Nyang 1999). The eastern seaboard of the United States was the most plausible point of entry for people from the Levant and South Asia, as it had been for the massive influx of European migrants in that era. While some settled within their own communities, intermarriage also occurred. Fazal Khan migrated from British India in 1912 and married a black American woman somewhere on the East Coast. Their daughter, Lurey Khan, can claim several descendants from the union. The Khan family is hardly a unique example, and similar narratives are pervasive in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware.

For some, intermarriage was primarily a matter of limited choices and the desire to attain the stability that family life engenders. For others, the added impetus of institution building existed. The founders of the Islamic Mission of America were both offspring of intermarriage. Shaykh Daoud Faisal had a Moroccan father and a Grenadian mother from the West Indies. His wife, Sister Khadija, had a “Pakistani” father and black Caribbean mother (Nyang 1999).

The First Muslim Mosque of Pittsburgh had been a Moorish Science Temple branch since its inception, due in large part to the paucity of activity by the Nation of Islam in the western Pennsylvania town. During the 1930s, Yusuf Khan, an immigrant from British India and proponent of the Ahmadiyyah movement, came into the Mosque to teach basic Islamic matters to a community where most adherents had never even seen a Qur’an. Khan’s teachings, however, caused disagreement and then a division, as many attendees felt his doctrines were inconsistent with Moorish Science tenets, particularly over the issue of Black Nationalism. A second split occurred in 1935 when Khan’s Ahmadiyyah orientation was regarded as antithetical to the Mosque’s congregation. This second schism demonstrates the impact of greater exposure to immigrant Muslims, the vast majority of whom espoused Sunni Islam and would have found Khan’s Ahmadiyyah claims to be abhorrent and heretical.

Sunni Muslims rejected the Moorish Science ideology on two grounds, that Noble Drew Ali crafted a separate scripture, the “Holy Koran,” which is of human authorship and differs substantially from the Qur’an. In addition, Drew Ali taught his followers that God is black, a notion inimical to Sunni sensitivities against ascribing to God anthropomorphic qualities (Schmidt 27).

African American Islam gained currency in the 1920s through the establishment of both the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple. Both of these movements mobilized against the societal hegemony of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority that saw itself triumphant after World War I ( GhaneaBassiri 2010:195). Although interaction with immigrant Muslims with these organizations was limited for many years, immigrant Muslims, upon encounter in the 1960s, saw the religion of these groups as primarily a political and nationalist movement or as a liberation theology, both alien and anathema concepts.

For African American Muslims, Islam allowed for a distinct identity, separate from that of white society yet possessing the legal protections given to religious organizations. Noble Drew Ali, for example, believed that Islam was the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s promotion of African nationalism. Ali declared that African Americans were to be known as Asiatic or Moorish, issuing nationality and identification cards that bore the Islamic symbols of the star and crescent moon. The cards also allowed members to assert a self-constructed identity, allowing them to circumvent Jim Crow laws by claiming membership in a racial identity outside the black/white binary at the center of those discriminatory regulations. Drew Ali reconciled artificial binaries of “West” and “East” by honoring the prophets of each “hemisphere’s” faith traditions: Jesus and Muhammad, as well as Buddha and Confucius. Drew Ali believed that before a people can have a God, they must first have a nationality (i.e., a national identity); names were similarly important as an identity marker if they conferred membership in a meta-category of nation. Islam’s ummah, a worldwide community of adherents, was a perfect model within which the Moorish Science Temple could seek and claim a sense of belonging.

Like the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam was influenced by African American migration to the northern states during the 1920s. It sought independence from white organizations that neither addressed nor particularly welcomed black inclusion in their ranks. Members of the Nation believe that Wallace Fard, (a.k.a. Fard Muhammad), was the spiritual force behind the movement, especially when he was reputed to have inculcated Elijah Muhammad with the teachings necessary for the Nation to form as a movement. Although there is some uncertainty as to Fard’s ethnicity—possibly Jamaican, Palestinian, a Qurayshi Arab from Mecca, Turk, Indian, even Jewish—there is speculation that he was a member of the Ahmadiyyah sect and may in fact have been from what became Pakistan (Ansari 1985). Upon receiving his ministry, Elijah Muhammad claimed his knowledge of truth to be superior to that given to prophets; that it was indeed perfect and more so than any revelation received by other messengers. It allowed Elijah Muhammad to claim that he was the only prophet that the Nation would recognize and, at the same time, caused immigrant Muslims to accuse him and the Nation of heresy (Curtis 2006).

While issues of cultural and ideological difference are nothing new to Islamic societies, in the United States, Muslims of immigrant background often voice skepticism when African American Muslims independently interpret Islam according to their communal experiences and history—especially when that history involves the Nation of Islam (Curtis 2002). Faced with an expression and doctrine of Islam that was inherently foreign to them, many immigrant Muslims viewed African American Muslims with skepticism as to their credentials on matters of religion or even leadership in religious organizations. At the same time, with scant interaction with African Americans culturally or historically, immigrant Muslims saw their coreligionists primarily as a racial not an ideological “other.”

Bruce Lawrence (2002:20) observes the extrinsic racialization inherent in the Muslim community of America. He detects contests over language, dress code, and mosque space between Arabs and South Asians, but “these pale next to the inter-Muslim racial values that separate African Americans from South Asians.” Part of the cause for such racialization has been the tendency toward immigrant self-identification with the dominant white culture over the black community, furthering a “racialized class privilege” (21). As the United States moves closer to becoming a majority-minority society, it will be important to assess whether immigrant Muslims realign their proclivities of emulation toward the new and emerging demographic critical mass. By 2043, the United States will have a majority that is non-white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant—a trend that is begun already with the nation becoming majority non-Protestant in 2012, and with the increasing Hispanic population (US Census Bureau, 2012). For Lawrence, “the major impediment to collective solidarity among Muslims remains internalized class prejudice” (83). Immigrant Muslims, like so many predecessor arrivals, have sought to emulate the broader societal tendency to place African Americans at the “lowest step of the ethno-racial pentagon” (84). Paradoxical to Islamic tenets, “racialized class prejudice runs deep, even in the face of a universalized religious ethos that eschews race as a marker of worth, even among American Muslims in the twentieth century” (84).

While ethnic groups such as Hispanics and black Americans will become the majority population relative to whites, economic factors may yet influence immigrant Muslims from forming stronger ties to these communities, in fact, motivating them to incline and relate to what may be seen as a minority community that has a disproportionate amount of wealth. Such tendencies seem to exist even today, in locales where there are large, if not majority, ethnic communities (e.g., urban areas like Los Angeles, Houston, and others).

Some scholars examine the relationship between African American and immigrant Muslim communities as a matter of perception; whether a product of anecdotal evidence or otherwise, such lines of demarcation are held and internalized within the discourse:

There has emerged a distinct division between the Pakistani, the Indian, Arabian, and African American communities which can be seen clearly in publications, organizational structures, and at social gatherings. The predominant group of native-born Muslims, African Americans, is rarely if ever consulted in da’wah efforts. The impression is made that Islam only comes with the successive waves of Muslim immigrants. This division is observable in the lack of partnerships between immigrants and African Americans. It has also been postulated that, for immigrants, there is a monolithic Islam in the Muslim world which is normative and the real experience of African Americans Muslims should be rejected; instead, they should aspire to effect something called “orthodox” Islam.

(McCloud 1995:169–170)

The cynicism felt by some African Americans is palpable: “Behavior of some members of the immigrant community is seen as having its counterpart: the behavior of imperialists and colonizers.” Dangerously, it is the mythos of immigrant Islam as a form of Islam “which belies the slide of some Muslim communities into tribalism, social apathy, and paralysis” (McCloud 1995:170).

Socioeconomic divides and a perceived reluctance to mitigate them or share resources adds to the negative perceptions of immigrant Muslims that some African American Muslims hold: “Since the immigrant communities prefer to keep their private schools separate, African American Muslims struggle to build schools and keep them running and to find qualified teachers” (McCloud 1995:171) While both communities find it difficult to fund, maintain, and qualify schools, there is the added sentiment that immigrant communities send any remaining funds overseas to finance projects instead of contributing and investing in ones within their own domestic locales.

Differing political philosophies and agendas have proven to be problematic, especially when African American Muslims perceive immigrant Muslims as speaking on behalf of a single, unified American Muslim polity. In the 2000 presidential elections, for example, it was “political arrogance” to suggest that the Muslim community had voted for George W. Bush (CAIR 2000). While it is true that prior to 9/11, immigrant Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Republican candidates, including Bush, African American Muslims have historically voted for the Democratic Party, as have their non-Muslim counterparts. Immigrant Muslims had subscribed to the national civic myth of self-reliance and a Protestant work ethic while maintaining fairly conservative social values in line with conventional Republican platform issues. By contrast, African Americans inclined toward the Democratic Party because of its historical affiliation to civil rights issues and other matters of concern and priority to the community, such as liberal values, a pro-immigration stance, and attention to social programs and education. This political fissure, though extant prior to 9/11, was the cause of further spasms of antagonism between African American and immigrant Muslims after the attacks, as the latter were seen as deliberately voting into office an administration responsible for promoting and implementing policies that impinged on civil liberties. While perhaps demonstrating political naiveté regarding issues of civil rights and their connection to the immigration and racial history of the country, the immigrant community nonetheless appeared comfortable with its choice until post-9/11 policies materialized. Although the entire episode served to recalibrate immigrant Muslim voting patterns to match those of African Americans, feelings of resentment persisted, especially when immigrant Muslims tried to assert a narrative of oppression and discrimination. The parallel narrative for African Americans was qualitatively different, deeper and in many ways still unresolved. Their experience with discrimination was borne of social and economic as well as legal policy spanning hundreds of years, while for immigrant Muslim Americans, discrimination was a function of policies implemented under the aegis of security measures and a concomitant societal suspicion for what was perceived to be a visible, identifiable potential threat.

Domination over the American Muslim narrative continues to be a major area of sensitivity between African American and immigrant religionists. “The racism and class/status consciousness of immigrant Muslims is felt keenly by African American Muslims who feel that they count only when someone wants to know how many Muslims are in this country or when some overseas donor wants to know about Islam in America” (McCloud 1995:173).

A sense of exploitation permeates the perceptions of some African American Muslims vis-à-vis immigrant Muslims, where the lack of reciprocity over important issues is felt. In March 2000, former Dar ul-Islam member Jamil El-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) was arrested and charged with a series of offenses. Pleas of support, both political and financial, from the more affluent immigrant community and its various organizations fell on deaf ears. Whether out of benign neglect or for more prejudiced reasons, such noticeable disengagements are remembered, internalized, and resented when the immigrant community approaches African American Muslims for issues it deems critical, such as cases involving the use of “secret evidence,” which implicated several immigrant Muslims in the 1990s and since 9/11, as well as matters concerning overseas attention (e.g., Palestine, Syria, and Kashmir). The irony is not lost on African American Muslims when large suburban mosques solicit the aid of African-American Muslim speakers like Imam Siraj Wahhaj for fundraising endeavors, either for expansion efforts for their own mosques or schools, or for collections to assist foreign causes. When these same centers receive requests for financial support from African American mosques or concerns, the response is usually muted or made with the pretense of charity rather than assistance of brethren.

African American perceptions of immigrant Muslims is not simply a reaction to attitudes of purported racialized class prejudice. Black orientalism also pervades some sectors of the African American consciousness. Christian African Americans, especially African American scholars, tend to deemphasize the role and contribution of Islam to the history of Africa or of Africa to Islamic history and perceive Islam, particularly black Islam, as a religious, political, and cultural threat. To many in the Christian black community, African American Muslims are perceived as defectors from black churches or secular spaces (Jackson 2005: 100). At the same time, African American Muslims decry the fact that immigrant Muslims reflexively incline toward dominant (white) society while neglecting their black coreligionists and their particular concerns that arise from social, economic, and political marginalization. This tendency has intensified since 9/11 as immigrant Muslims see themselves under siege by both government and society:

Given this increased vulnerability in the aftermath of 9/11, there is a perduring temptation among many immigrant Muslims to seek acceptance by mainstream America in exchange for a domesticated Islam that can only support the state and the dominant culture and never challenge there.

(Jackson 2005: 152)

Socioeconomic status did not necessarily provide immunity or protection for many middle-class immigrant Muslims after 9/11. Despite living the “American dream,” their fortunes were deeply damaged when they were subjected to arrest, deportation, or rendition. Even those who were not ultimately incarcerated or removed from the country, legal expenses and negative impact to employment status had a debilitating effect.

Immigrant Muslim dissonance about the Blackamerican community is in part because Blackamerican (a term distinguished from “African American,” asserting the American birth over African ancestry of black Americans) consciousness, Muslim or otherwise, was forged in the chasm between the Civil War and its promise for the improvement of Blackamerican rights and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. The Blackamerican movement saw civic and political engagement as a sine qua non to attain equality, dignity, and heretofore denied rights. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, was founded in 1909, and Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914. Ironically, this was a similar trajectory for the nascent Islamic movement in seventh-century Arabia. Of course, immigrant Muslims were not participants in the American civil rights struggle in any identifiable measure; this lack of agency has caused a lack of context and, in some cases, empathy for the plight of Blackamericans then and now. Moreover, it is plausible that their lack of familiarity with the civil rights struggle and reticence to engage politically and civically was because they were not privy to an essential aspect of the American ethos that is couched in the struggle for the rights of many groups, either for themselves or for others. When African American Muslims implored immigrant Muslims to maintain resolve and resist an obsequious approach, especially in the face of discrimination, the immigrant community defied the advice, either out of a sense of denial or hubris that civil rights was an issue or cause to embrace. Moreover, the immigrant community attempted to impose its strategy of quiescence upon the African American community, telling them to “lay low” while Muslim Americans were under such surveillance and scrutiny. Blackamericans did not receive this suggestion well, especially as it was antithetical to their own historical experience.

Furthermore, as immigrant Muslims are frustrated with what they perceive as American institutions and modalities that adversely impact societies in the traditional Muslim world,

Blackamerican Muslims are called upon to reject sociocultural norms and institutions that religiously committed Arab, Indian-Pakistani and other immigrant Muslims see no contradiction in freely accepting. The result is an Islamic anti-Westernism that leads Blackamerican Muslims to poverty, lack of education, and crime, while Arab, Indian-Pakistani and other immigrant Muslims continue to swell the ranks of America’s doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs.

(Jackson 2005: 152)

Jackson inquires as to whether Blackamerican cultural orthodoxy is too Western, thereby perceived by immigrant Muslims as cultural heresy and consequently giving these immigrants further cover and vindication to disenfranchise African American Muslims from sharing in the construction of an American Muslim narrative (Jackson 2005: 154). Of course, implicit in such an inquiry is the requirement to question the source of authority that immigrant Muslims asserted to construct the narrative and that the participants selected to frame it. In addition, it also requires exploration as to how a culture that is thoroughly Western may be too Western.

Given the myriad issues plaguing the African American community, particularly along social and economic lines, there is a perception within the community that immigrant Muslims are competing with them as to who has the hegemony on suffering. In many immigrant mosques throughout the country, the plight of Palestinians, Syrians, Kashmiris, Rohingya Muslims, and a host of others are identified, supported, and championed to the detriment and exclusion of the African American issues, despite their obvious geographic proximity.

The events of September 11, 2001, have had a profound effect on the American Muslim community in general, particularly vis-à-vis the psychological impact it has had on immigrant and African American Muslims alike. As the entire community has been perceived through the lens of securitization or, more specifically, as a security problem, Muslims have had to cope with either internalizing or defying tropes of being un-American or, worse, a threat to society. While anxieties over discrimination, collective suspicion, and community-specific policies have become common features of the Muslim consciousness, 9/11 has had a catalytic impact on relations bridging some of the chasms between African American and immigrant Muslim communities. Prior to 9/11, and due mainly to a well-subscribed belief among many immigrant Muslims that socioeconomic status insulated and immunized them from societal scrutiny, the issue of civil rights was a low priority. With the passage of the USA Patriot Act and investigations and interrogations increasing in frequency for many in the community, immigrant Muslims turned to their African American coreligionists for advice and guidance. These engagements did not occur without a certain amount of skepticism and even cynicism at the sudden outreach to the African American Muslims, who perceived the sudden shift from ambivalence/avoidance to amicability as mere desperation and necessity. After all, for decades, immigrant Muslims had followed some conventional trajectories of assimilation, including Anglo-conformity. Whether due to socioeconomic, cultural, or other factors, they had maintained limited contact with the African African Muslim community and, with it, limited exposure to the civil rights narrative. Facing the need for a quick primer on asserting political rights, as well as acknowledging the merit of the strength inherent to a larger, unified community, immigrant Muslims sought the help of African American Muslims to teach them how to navigate uncharted civic waters. In the process, they were reminded of their relative inexperience in understanding and engaging the civil rights narrative and struggle and the costs for such neglect. It also exposed the futility in what was perceived as the dangers in believing that a certain amount of assimilation with dominant society provided insulation from discrimination; in the zeal to “act white,” many immigrants faced a marginalization even deeper than what African American Muslims faced after 9/11. Blackamerican Muslims, for example, were not immediately associated with the “immigrant” Muslims who had committed the acts of 9/11. Moreover, the racial history of the country and the continuing social dynamics of the United States led to the perception of many Blackamerican Muslims as being primarily a function of their racial rather than their religious identity. Eventually, immigrant Muslim efforts to gain a greater degree of knowledge and education that draws from the historical experiences of the civil rights era and America’s darker racial periods were beneficial for contemporary application and engagement on matters of discrimination from public or private sources.

Socioeconomic differences complicate African American and immigrant Muslim relations. In several metropolitan areas across the country, communities are divided along urban and suburban lines of demarcation, yet wealth is not necessarily a factor that divides. As studies show, most immigrant Muslims live in the suburbs of metropolitan areas (Pew Report: Muslims in America 2007). For African Americans, historical impediments such as restrictive covenants in property conveyances, dubious lending practices, and discriminatory attitudes have affected access to such communities. While many well-intended immigrant Muslims may wish to engage with African American Muslims, oftentimes such opportunities unintentionally appear patronizing. In the Detroit area, some suburban Islamic centers hold toy drives or other clothing collections, especially during the month of Ramadan and in anticipation of the Eid festivities. These efforts are then seen as being an imperative of charity rather than a gesture of brotherhood. A certain amount of skepticism pervades when it is noticed that these endeavors occur once or twice a year, coinciding with major festivals of the Islamic calendar when charity is encouraged as a spiritual obligation, but there is no engagement in between these periods.

For some immigrant Muslims, exposure to the African American Muslim community came by way of Imam Siraj Wahhaj. The Brooklyn-based religious leader has been a prominent voice in the United States for over two decades and has been a popular speaker, especially in venues frequented by immigrant Muslims. Though head of the Al-Taqwa Mosque, Wahhaj spends several days a year traveling across America, delivering inspirational speeches that fortify Muslim identity, the role of civic engagement and spirituality.

Today, the influence of African American Muslim scholars in shaping the discourse for Islam in the United States serves as a significant factor in bridging communities. Sherman Jackson, Aminah McCloud, Intisar Rabb, and Zaid Shakir are leading intellectual voices whose scholarship has currency in both African American and immigrant spaces. Jackson, the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Southern California, is a founding scholar of the American Learning Institute for Muslims, a Michigan-based center that provides intensive programs on Islamic issues with a particular emphasis on critical thinking. Dr. McCloud heads the Islamic World Studies at DePaul University in Chicago and is also editor of the Journal of Islamic Law and Culture. Intisar Rabb, formerly at the New York University School of Law, joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 2014, specializing in Islamic law. Zayd Shakir is a founding member of Zaytuna College, the nation’s first four-year liberal arts Islamic college, in Berkeley, California. Each of these scholars speaks to the broader Muslim community, at conferences of various Islamic organizations, as well as at mosques and other Islamic centers.

At the 2003 annual conference for the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization in the United States, Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan decried the fact that Chicago was simultaneously hosting two Muslim conferences: the Islamic Society of North America and the annual conference for the American Society of Muslims, an African American Muslim association led at the time by the late W.D. Mohammed. Ramadan asserted that the immigrant Muslim dominated Islamic Society of North America needed to stage a more effective campaign of integration by welcoming or even merging with the American Society of Muslims to have a single, unified event. The Islamic Circle of America, a predominantly South Asian Muslim organization, has made strides to broaden its appeal to include African American Muslims, particularly at its annual conference, which it cosponsors with the Muslim American Society, another largely immigrant-based association.

The impact of African American culture, especially as refracted through Muslim artists, has become a popular and pervasive influence among immigrant Muslims. Comedians like Dave Chappelle and hip-hop artists such as Yasinn Bey (formerly Mos Def) and Lupe Fiasco have great currency among second-generation immigrant youth who feel as though they can participate in American culture while simultaneously affirming Muslim identity and a sense of Muslim pride. This bridging of a gap with African American society has contributed to the establishment of a cultura franca that may facilitate interaction between the two communities, albeit in a single, narrowly inscribed area.

American Islam in the twenty-first century will require further rapprochement between the African American and immigrant Muslim communities if it is to survive and thrive as a cohesive group living up to its full potential. Overcoming the gap between communities is of paramount importance:

This duality between indigenous and immigrant Muslim Americans is fundamental to the Muslim American future. Difference between them may persist or may attenuate, but they can never be eradicated. They will remain as distinctive markers of cultural disparities that, despite creedal and ritual sympathies, separate African Americans from South Asian Muslims. Their basis is a racialized class prejudice against African Americans that predates the twentieth century and circulates beyond the parameters of a Muslim American community, however broadly defined [by] its membership.

(Lawrence 2002:123)

In areas where the socioeconomic profile is fairly uniform, one finds increased interaction among Muslim Americans. Hamtramck, Michigan, is a small enclave within and surrounded by the city of Detroit. Historically an epicenter for Polish American life, Hamtramck has undergone a significant metamorphosis over the past two decades, developing a substantial Muslim population. Immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen, and West Africa now share space with African American Muslims. Class homogeneity facilitates engagement in this small locale better than in some more affluent suburban communities. Other cities that resemble the Hamtramck example include Brooklyn, New York, and Boston.

As second- and third-generation Muslim Americans of immigrant heritage become a larger and more active segment of the community, there are signs of change regarding their perceptions of engagement with African American Muslims of their age and peer groups. They are much more comfortable with both the lingua franca, English, and the cultural franca of America, two factors that provided some barriers, real or perceived, for past generations to engage comfortably. Moreover, these new generations are more attuned to the cultural modalities of their parents’ countries of origin and are invested in crafting a distinctive American Muslim identity. They still have to contend, however, with family pressures and aspirations to take on certain career paths and to marry within cultural and ethnic groups, in some cases under fear of disinheritance and/or social ostracization, especially among newly arriving immigrant Muslims. At the same time, intrareligious perceptions of pluralism seem to be taking root, and the notion of an expanded definition of being an American Muslim may be underway. This, of course, will require enfranchisement and engagement of a broad spectrum of the Muslim experience in the United States, including the participation of African American Muslims.

The relationship between African American and immigrant Muslims in America is less than a century old in terms of substantial interaction. Thus far, the morphology of the interaction has assumed a marital tone and track, as both groups have sought to become familiar with one another and have stumbled through each other’s idiosyncrasies, taken each other for granted, inured to miscommunication and endured a litany of misunderstanding. At the same time, neither side has the luxury or option of separation, as both constitute parts of the American Muslim experience. As this relationship enters a new dimension with the progeny of immigrant Muslims now integrating into society, the level of engagement within the Muslim community at large will similarly reflect notions of identity reconstruction and expand the definition of who is and has the authority to define being an American Muslim.

African American Muslims correctly see themselves as indigenous members of society in the United States, with a history and experience that is both unique and also tied to a transnational narrative. Immigrant Muslims have tried to forge an identity in America that began with dislocation and migration. Following assimilation and integration trends that mirror the trajectory of prior migrant groups, Muslims from around the world have converged in the United States to build new lives in new environs. That these two communities have had challenges in achieving an intrareligious integration is self-evident and the consequence of a myriad factors including socioeconomic, ethnic, and even racial components. Yet as the offspring of immigrants, now in the second and third generation and beyond, mature and take their place within society and within the institutions of American Muslim public life, they will begin to identify increasingly as indigenous Muslims themselves, having known no place of birth of upbringing beyond America’s shores. It will be incumbent upon them to look beyond their respective ethnic and cultural boundaries to develop stronger connections to their African American coreligionists. Conversely, it is important for African American Muslims to see these Muslims as equally indigenous, not as foreigners, in the pursuit of defining the next phase of the American Muslim narrative.