Turning to Islam: African-American conversion stories

Christian Century, July 12, 2003 by Rose-Marie Armstrong

I WAS SEARCHING for several years before I became a Muslim," says Abdus Salaam, a marketing specialist from Birmingham, Alabama. "I was baptized during this time in the Church of Christ. But I had questions. What bothered me were the white pictures of Jesus and Mary. In Islam we have no pictures, not even of the Prophet Muhammad. As a child I wondered if black and white people had a separate God!"

Salaam's story is familiar among African-American converts to Islam. While newfound faith is central to their stories, race and personal empowerment are also key parts of the narratives. The indignity of discrimination, unfortunately mirrored in Christian churches, haunts African-Americans.

The freedom that Khalid Abdul Kareem, a native of Washington, D.C., found in Islam feels right to him. "African-Americans have been disconnected and disenfranchised," says Kareem. "At about the age of 171 realized that Islam wasn't racist. It established the nature of who I am, why I am here, and where I am going. I am the Creator's vice-regent; I have no boundaries. I was created by a loving God who has a purpose for me. I can go wherever I choose to take my abilities." Now 48, Kareem says, "Islam contains truth that is dependent only on God. It liberates us from man."

African-Americans make up about a third of the estimated 4 to 8 million Muslims in the U.S.--conservatively, around 1.5 million, nearly 5 percent of all African-Americans. According to a poll conducted in 2001 by Muslims in the American Public Square (MAPS), 20 percent of African-American Muslims are converts while 80 percent were raised Muslim. More detailed information about Islam in the African-American community, however, is relatively scarce.

Robert Dannin has opened a new and fascinating perspective on the subject in his recently published book Black Pilgrimage to Islam. Using the methods of ethnographic research to collect his information, Dannin tells what he calls "conversion sagas"--rich, unvarnished stories about individual African-American's journeys into Islam. He also traces the history of Islam among African-Americans by tying together such key developments as the formation of black fraternal lodges in the 18th and 19th centuries; Noble Drew Ali's 1913 organization of the Moorish Science Temple in Newark, New Jersey; the growth of various Islamic missionary and revivalist movements beginning in the 19th and continuing throughout the 20th centuries; and the conversion to Islam of be-bop jazz musicians who helped raise the faith's profile in the African-American community.

Dannin also introduces what he admits is a "taboo" subject: that a portion of "African-American society has always been unchurched," that African-American lodges have traditionally been centers of "unchurched religious practices and beliefs," and that since the end of the civil rights era unchurched African-Americans "have been moving more rapidly toward Islam." Dannin contends that the "voice of the unchurched" has been repressed by the black church's command of African-American history.

The various movements, organizations and institutions of unchurched African-Americans, Dannin argues, constitute an alternative to and in some cases a subversion of the black church. Even in the post Reconstruction era black fraternal lodges "clearly threatened the African-American church's monopoly of social and civic life." Similarly, Islam, in all of its forms within the black community, has offered an option for those who "thirst for an alternative to the church."

African-American Muslims I spoke with consistently explained Islam's appeal in terms of four benefits: a new sense of personal empowerment; a rigorous call to discipline; an emphasis on family structure and values; and a clear standard of moral behavior. But negative comments about Christianity and its associations with slavery and discrimination regularly accompany their expressions of gratitude to Islam, suggesting that Dannin's "alternative" hypothesis deserves consideration. Read between the lines and it's hard not to conclude that for many African-Americans an added appeal of Islam is that it's not Christianity.

"Humans serve their highest and best interest by serving God, which is characterized by building their own lives," says Abdul Mallek Mohammad, a spokesman for the leader of the Muslim American Society, W. Deen Muhammad. Mohammad argues that slavery took away African-Americans' ability to properly serve God, even though they lived in a Christian culture. God ordains "freedom, equality, justice and peace," and so "provides a foundation for life and the stability of community," he says. But blacks in this country have been deprived of this divinely authorized foundation. "African-Americans' history bears out that their humanity was not valued. Even now, there are pockets of racism in America that question the humanity of black people."

W. Deen Muhammad, one of the most eminent Muslim leaders in America, is the son of Elijah Muhammad, the longtime head of the Nation of Islam (NOI) who died in 1975. The elder Muhammad built a strong following that elevated both the emotional and material status of black men and women. Known as the Black Muslims, the members of this movement recruited from among the disadvantaged, welcoming ex-inmates as brothers wronged by a system of oppression. Malcolm X, who later converted to orthodox Islam, is the most notable example. Muhammad also established businesses and put men in black suits, white shirts and black bow ties. His organization, which began in the 1930s, was strongly antiwhite. It is now led by Louis Farrakhan--albeit with what Farrakhan says are major changes in philosophy.