Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Peril and Possibility 2 9 3mentally resurrect the “so-called Negro” and prepare him for the end of theworld, when God would destroy whites and restore the black Islamic nation toits original place of glory.These teachings came to the nation’s attention during the civil rights era,when black middle-class leaders such as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.argued that the Nation of Islam and other “black nationalist” groups were theproduct of poor race relations and inequality. In 1959, Mike Wallace of CBSNews made similar arguments in a television documentary about the Nation ofIslam entitled The Hate That Hate Pro d u c e d . In addition to introducing the Nationof Islam to the United States, this program featured much footage of theattractive, articulate, and righteously angry Malcolm X (1925–1965), who wasone of Elijah Muhammad’s most effective organizers and representatives.Because many scholars of African American Islam have focused their researchon the Nation of Islam, much less is known about the thousands ofAfrican Americans who converted to and practiced other forms of Islam, includingSunni Islam, as early as the 1930s. Groups like the First ClevelandMosque, guided by an African American Muslim convert named Wali Akram(d. 1994), often focused their attention on the Five Pillars of Islam and on theQur’an. Other examples of early black Muslim communities include theAdenu Allahe Universal Arabic Association in Buffalo, New York, and JabulArabiyya, a Muslim communal farm also located in New York State. Their presenceshows that the practice of Islam in the African American community wascharacterized by religious diversity from the time of its inception, and further,it suggests that the very diversity of Islamic communities may have been onefactor in Islam’s continuing growth among black Americans.At the same time that more and more African Americans were coming toidentify themselves as Muslims, the number of Muslims in the United Statesalso rose due to another wave of immigration from the Islamic world. AfterWorld War II, many of the former European colonies in Asia and Africa declaredtheir independence from the European powers. In the wake of thesepolitical revolutions, persons who had been aligned with the occupying powersor who were seen as opponents of the new regimes were often dispossessed.In the case of Israel, which declared its independence in 1948, manyPalestinian Arabs lost their homes and livelihoods, and some sought refuge inthe United States. After the 1952 revolution in Egypt, Egyptians who lost favorwith the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser also fled. These immigrants joinedother Arab Muslim Americans who were, by this time, starting to organize on anational scale. In 1952, Muslim Americans formed the Federation of IslamicAssociations in the United States and Canada, a network of more than twentymosques in North America.During the 1950s, students from the newly independent states in Africa andAsia also started to attend U.S. universities in large numbers. In many in-