Conference hosted by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 3 and 4, 2000.
Keynote Speaker: Imam Warith Dean Mohammed, Muslim American leader and advocate for universal human excellence. Islam Online, Cambridge, MA
Just a week after Louis Farrakhan moved towards reconciling with Warith Deen Mohammed, leader of the largest Muslim community in America, Imam Mohammed was charting out a new course for American Muslims at a Harvard University conference.
"We have to believe that America is open to us, and that God is with us," said the 67-year-old Mohammed in his keynote address at the two-day, student-organized conference entitled "The Growth and Development of Islam in America."
Bringing together up to 300 scholars, students and supporters of Mohammed from as far away as Chicago, South Carolina and Florida, the conference focused on the long journey of more than a million African American Muslims from the race-based, unorthodox Islam of Elijah Mohammed's "Nation of Islam" to mainstream Sunni Islam - and on just how far Muslims have to go to integrate Islam into American life.
During his address Mohammed looked back at the Nation of Islam movement, which began in the 1930s when his father, Elijah Mohammed, proclaimed that his teacher, the Lahore-born WD Fard, was a manifestation of God, and he himself was a messenger. While the teachings - for example that God was the black man of Asia - were false, "they prepared us to one day discover the truth," he said.
After Elijah Mohammed died in 1975, Mohammed led the movement to embrace orthodox Islam. The 15-year rift with Farrakhan, who broke away from Mohammed to continue the black nationalist teachings of the Nation of Islam, seemed to be coming to a close on February 26, when Farrakhan confirmed that the 7th-century Mohammed ibn Abdullah was God's last messenger, rather than Elijah Mohammed.
"He [Farrakhan] embraced me and I embraced him, and we pledged to be friends," Mohammed told the conference, noting that their organizations would remain separate. Numbers are difficult to confirm, but experts estimate that Farrakhan has a following of up to 50,000, while up to 1.5 million are associated with Imam Mohammed's leadership.
With rapid immigration from South Asia and other parts of the Muslim world, however, African American Muslims now make up less than half of the total population of American Muslims, estimated between 6 and 8 million. Scholars, speaking at the conference, argued that there is a "desperate need" for Muslims in America to work together to create an indigenous Islamic culture.
"Who speaks for the Muslims in America?" asked Yvonne Haddad, a professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown. With Muslims serving in institutions ranging from prison to the armed services, the US government frequently seeks authoritative advice on how to accommodate inmates, soldiers, teachers, students and other citizens. “The special task for Muslims is to fit into the American legal system," Haddad said.
Yet responding to legal challenges is difficult, argued Amina McCloud, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University, because while many Muslims attend law school, they tend to practice American law only, and those trained abroad in Islamic law are not qualified to practice in the US. "What we really need are people trained in both in American law and Islamic law," said McCloud, who has authored a guidebook for Muslim prison inmates.
Given this uncertainty about Muslim leadership in America, many have turned to academics to fill the gap, said Sherman Jackson, an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan. This may be an unfortunate trend, argued Jackson, because academics must operate within the confines of the American university: their visions of Islam may be "overinfluenced" by secular constraints.
Jackson advocated instead for a focus on Islamic literacy. "The highest priority is to educate the Muslim population so they can more intelligently consume information about Islam. When a sheikh comes from the Middle East, American Muslims should not be overawed by his perspective," said Jackson.
Jackson called for American Muslims to "translate" instead of "transliterate" Islam into their own context. In particular, he pointed to the need for "home-grown ulema" who are intimately acquainted with the practical religious questions that American Muslims face daily.
But, Jackson continued, "Many of the problems confronting Muslims are not questions of law, but a question of cultural production. No amount of law will change what a veiled Muslim women experiences when she walks down the street. Instead you must change American culture, which means getting inside of it and directing it."
Mohammed Ali, the world heavyweight boxing champion, blazed such a path when he insisted that the world know him by his adopted Muslim name rather than his given name, said Sulayman Nyang, professor of African Studies at Howard University, pointing out that many Muslim immigrants still "Americanize" their Muslim names. Nyang called for American Muslims to insist on local expressions of Islam: "You can eat your halal hotdog and be as American as the next person," he said.
Behind all of these debates lay the question of political power: How involved will Muslims become in public life? Haddad, noting that many Muslim immigrants still view the Unites States only as the land of the "kufar" or unbelievers, challenged American Muslims to make a choice: "They can either choose to get in and clean out the political mess, because America is in a mess, or they can sit there and damn it."
Lest conference participants think these questions were all new, historians painted vivid scenes of Islam's early chapters in America.
Amir Muhammad, a researcher and author who displayed his traveling museum on American Muslim history, argued that Muslims first arrived in America as early as 1312, when explorers from Mali traveled up the Mississippi river. Through his presentation and the museum itself - assembling photographs and documents from three centuries of American life - Muhammad highlighted little-known points of Muslim American history, ranging from Muslims' involvement in the War of 1812, to the fact that in 1991 Charles Bilal of Kountze, Texas, became the nation's first Muslim mayor.
Sylviane Diouf, an expert on Muslims in American slavery, attested to the tenacity of Muslim slaves in keeping their traditions alive, as they refused to eat pork, fasted during Ramadan and wrote down copies of the Qur'an from memory. "Islam did not survive in a passive manner [among slaves]. It was deliberately developed and reinforced, and often at great personal cost," said Diouf.
Arguing that the Islam carried to America by slaves left a lasting if subtle mark on African American culture, Diouf played a Senegalese recording of the adhan, followed by a recording of an African American singing the blues in a Mississippi jail - the long resonant notes were strikingly similar. Such connections are only waiting to be made, said Diouf, urging more historians to examine America's earliest Islamic history.
The conference ended with the very phenomenon the scholars had been calling for - a celebration of indigenous American Islam. As Wilmore Sadiki, a Navy jet mechanic turned musician, sang his bluesy, swinging praise songs, the delighted audience shouted back, "Allahu Akbar!"
Conference email address: islaminamerica@aol.com
