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chapter 7 African American Islam as an Expression of Converts’ Religious Faith and Nationalist Dreams and Ambitions Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons When we look at Islamic conversion amongst African Americans, it is important to contextualize this phenomenon within the history of African American religion, which has traditionally been a response to the group’s peculiar history and particular circumstances in the United States of America. “From the very beginning,” Charles Long writes, [Africans] were brought here in chains and this country has attempted to keep them in this condition in one way or another. Their presence here as human beings in the United States has always constituted a threat to the majority population. From the point of view of the majority population, [Africans] have been simply and purely legal persons, first as slaves defined in terms of property, and then after the abolition [of] slavery as chattel property, [and] as citizens who had to seek legal redress before they could use the common facilities of the country—water fountains, public accommodations , restaurants, schools, etc. (1997, 27) It was in this situation that African Americans had to retain their humanity and their sanity. One of the main ways in which they did this was through the development of various religious institutions, invisible and visible. At the heart of this development of African American religious traditions has been the effort, at both the individual and collective levels through social action, rituals, or political militancy, to counter the twin insults of white racism and economic exploitation. As Manning Marable, a well-known political scientist and social activist, asserts, “the totality of the black religious experience cannot be understood outside of the development of white racism and capitalist exploitation” and the African American response to these twin evils (1981, 34). Scholars from numerous disciplines have all affirmed the significance of religion in African American life and what many believe was its indispensable role in the survival of this group. For African Americans, says the noted black historian E. Franklin Frazier, religion has historically functioned as a “refuge in a hostile white world” (in Baer and Singer 1992, ix). People of a f r i c a n a m e r i c a n i s l a m 173 African ancestry in America shaped Euro-American Christianity, as well as Judaism and Islam, to meet their own needs and to serve as social institutions that they could call their own. Baer and Singer, anthropologists who have studied African American religions, state: “African Americans have utilized religion as a way of creating space in addressing the vagaries of racism and class stratification” (Baer and Singer 1992, ix). W. E. B. DuBois, the first American scholar to give serious attention to the religious life of African Americans in his 1903 seminal work, The Souls of Black Folks, wrote that “churches [I would add mosques and temples] constitute centers of social life for the African American and serve as primary vehicles of communication and sites for entertainment and amusement in the black community. They have traditionally served as mutual aid societies helping members to survive the crises in their lives” (Baer and Singer 1992, ix). As Baer and Singer further note, another role that African American religion has played is as a “form of self-expression and [individual] resistance to white dominated society.” Marable has observed that black religious institutions have also “served as rallying centers for political and economic reform” (Baer and Singer 1992, x). From Nat Turner (who led the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history) to Elijah Muhammad, to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, Jr., religious leaders have been the leaders and visionaries in the black struggle against white racism and its institutional manifestations. African Americans have expressed their “protonational consciousness” primarily through religion , which has enabled them as a mass of oppressed people to cohere as a people and work for the good of the group. Blacks found a voice, many and variegated voices, which spoke not only of their spiritual quest and fulfillment but also of their earthly trials and their social yearnings. It has been through this “interplay of worldly and otherworldly images and attributes [that] African Americans [have] constructed their identity as a people” (Baer and Singer 1992, xvii). Because it is within a religious context and only within that context that blacks were able to have some form of autonomy and agency, their religion has been political and their politics has...

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