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

Peril and Possibility 2 9 5tion, whether political or racial, that was not based on Islam. Malcolm X, howev e r, refused to accept the call of his Muslim brothers to abandon the fight forblack liberation, saying he felt his first duty was to help persons of African descentachieve full equality. Some Muslims, like Said Ramadan of the Geneva IslamicCentre, encouraged Malcolm to abandon this focus on black liberationand instead champion the spread of Islam as a solution to the race problem inthe United States.The conflict between Malcolm X and those aligned with Saudi interests isimportant, since it reveals the centrality of transnational encounters and exchangesin the making of U.S. Islam. From the beginning of modern U.S. Islamichistory, indigenous forms of Islam have developed partly in response tothe encounter between immigrant Muslims and African Americans. As thes t o ry of Malcolm X shows, moreover, what was happening a world away couldhave an impact on the practice of Islam in the United States. In addition, MalcolmX’s story shows how the domestic struggle for black liberation was a keyfactor in the formation of racially segregated Muslim communities in theUnited States. Like Malcolm X, many other African American Muslims insistedon a version of Islamic practice that made room for or responded to the fightfor freedom and equality, and they felt that only by uniting with other blackMuslims could they achieve their goals.For some African Americans, one strategy to achieve liberation was to separatethemselves from mainstream white and black society, forming vanguardsthat strictly followed the precepts of shari’a. In the early 1960s, for example, apredominately African American group of believers broke away from theState Street Mosque in Brooklyn to form their own Ya-Sinn Mosque. Othersfocused on more active community involvement and on building a multiethnicIslam. In the late 1960s, Sheik Tawfiq, an African American from Florida,founded the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, New York. Stressingthe call of Islamic universalism, African Americans, Hispanics, and othersprayed together, established housing and education programs, and ran smallbusinesses.In this pivotal decade of U.S. history, a serious rift also began to develop betweenworking-class and middle-class Muslims. This divide took on distinctlyethnic and racial characteristics. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signeda new immigration bill that reversed the 1924 law severely restricting nonwhiteimmigration to the United States. As a result, thousands of persons from LatinAmerica, Asia, and Africa began to arrive on U.S. shores. Between 1965 and1990, over 800,000 persons came from South Asia alone. Some of the SouthAsian Muslim immigrants were successful doctors, engineers, and academicians.Although they eventually joined Arab and other Muslims in formingnew Muslim communities, these middle-class Muslims did not often mix withpredominately working-class African American Muslims. Even today, most