A bit late for Black Heritage Month, but here’s an interesting article about race in the American Muslim community.
Prophet Muhammad said in his last sermon: All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action.
Interesting article. I particularly like the imam’s decision to hang up the Arab dress. I live in Baltimore and now work in Washington, DC. When I worked in Baltimore, I regularly attended juma’ at the Walter Omar masjid which was (and still is) a majority African-American mosque. I generally picked the closest masjid at the time (some masjids — like the overtly Salafi ones — I deliberately avoided) but I tried when I could to make it to Walter Omar.
I liked and appreciated the very “American-ness” of the place. There was no gender segregation, men and women using the same front door and praying in the same room if not in the same line, and greeting each other warmly after the prayer. I remember attending one juma’ with my son who was then a toddler. One of the brothers held my son within sight of his dad, so I could finish my prayer. No hennaed full beards, no Arab robes, but the occasional sub-saharan African dress, and no turbans. The imam in a coat and tie, or a sweater on the cold days. No shouted khutbahs about the kufar or the filisteen or Kashmir, and no reciting the list of American “crimes,” particularly noteworthy from a people who have been the victims of violence and oppression at the hands of their fellow Americans for most of 400 years.
On that still very raw first Friday after 9/11, I remember the resolve at Walter Omar to continue to be both proudly American and Muslim, as well as at the concern that other Muslims, especially the Arab and South Asian ones (or those that look like them), were about to go through a bad time in America.