On Black American Muslims.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. One of the most well-known, recognized and beloved Americans of all times—world-wide—is Muhammad Ali.
Ali may be the face many of us connect to when thinking of black Americans and Islam, but the roots of Islam in America go back to the founding, and have been a key part of black American culture.
I had written something else for today, and decided to scrap it. I’m beyond angry.
The dangerous witch-hunt spews from Trump and his rabid supporters, the anti-Muslim hysteria in the press and online strikes close to home for me. I am not Muslim, though I often wear a head-wrap. My husband’s name is Nadhiyr, and he is the Puerto Rican grandson of a South Asian immigrant. I have cousins who are Muslim and I spent my teenage years in a neighborhood in Queens NY where many of my neighbors were black American jazz musicians — who were Muslim.
The History
The PBS History Detectives Series, did a feature on “Islam in America” which covered a lot of the roots.
When the first Muslims came to the land that would become the United States is unclear. Many historians claim that the earliest Muslims came from the Senegambian region of Africa in the early 14th century. It is believed they were Moors, expelled from Spain, who made their way to the Caribbean and possibly to the Gulf of Mexico. When Columbus made his journey to the United States, it is said he took with him a book written by Portuguese Muslims who had navigated their way to the New World in the 12th century.
Others claim there were Muslims, most notably a man named Istafan, who accompanied the Spanish as a guide to the New World in the early 16th century in their conquest of what would become Arizona and New Mexico. What is clear is the make up of the first real wave of Muslims in the United States: African slaves of whom 10 to 15 percent were said to be Muslims. Maintaining their religion was difficult and many were forcibly converted to Christianity. Any effort to practice Islam, and keep the traditional clothing and names alive had to be done in secret. There was an enclave of African-Americans on the Georgia coast that managed to maintain their faith until the early part of the 20th century.
They cite some demographic data:
The estimated number of Muslims in this country varies, depending on the source. The American Muslim Council claims 5 million, while the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies believes the figure is closer to between 3 to 4 million followers of Islam. The American Religious Identification Study by the City University of New York, completed in 2001 put the number of Muslims at 1, 104,000. Over the years, the nation gained public prominence due to famous members like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Today, there are more than 1500 Islamic centers and mosques around the country.
Figures vary, but experts estimate that between four and seven million Americans are Muslim.Islam is expected to soon be the second largest religion in America. Since the attacks of 9/11, prejudice against Muslims has risen sharply.
I attended Mosque #7 in New York to hear Malcolm X speak. The Islamic Cultural Center, in East Harlem, which started construction in 1987 claims to be NYC’s first mosque, but that isn’t the truth. Temple #7 opened in 1946 at the Harlem YMCA.
Martin Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Islamic Religious Traditions at Fairfield University, has some very interesting data on his blog Islamicana. Kiran Tahir’s post “New York’s First Mosque?” includes this news clipping from 1923.
There is also the fascinating, and mostly overlooked history of Muslim immigrants from South Asia. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, by Vivek Bald, tells their stories.
In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.
The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.
Young Puerto Ricans who founded Alianza Islamica in East Harlem, in 1975, included Latin Jazz artist and WBAI radio host Ibrahim Gonzales, known as “Mambo Dervish” to his listeners. Ibrahim passed away two years ago.
He was a friend, and thinking about him today, made me reflect on the music I grew up with and still love. We don't often think of jazz, as influenced by Islam, and yet so many jazz artists of note, embraced the faith.
The list is a long one — including drumming great Art Blakey, and many of his jazz Messengers, “Sahib Shihab (alto saxophone), Orlando Wright (Musa Kaleem, tenor saxophone), Kenny Dorham (Abdul Hamid, trumpet), Howard Bowe (Haleen Rasheed, trombone), Walter Bishop (Ibrahim Ibn Ismail, piano)”
Musicians like McCoy Tyner, Jackie McLean, Ahmad Jamal, Grant Green, Yusef Lateef, and Pharoah Sanders were/are Muslim. That list includes the jazz vocalist Aliyah Rabia who used the stage name Dakota Staton. I knew her as my friend Farouk’s mom — Mrs. Dawud. As a teenager I spent time running in and out of the home of John Coltrane, whose wife Naima was Muslim, and though it is not clear if Trane ever converted, his music was clearly influenced by Islam — there is an interesting piece discussing this, at AlJazeera: Did Coltrane say 'Allah Supreme'?
For those of you who are not jazz fans, you probably know the music of Kool and the Gang — who were also Muslim, and there are many young rappers who are Muslim as well.
I’ll stick to jazz today.
Here’s Ahmad Jamal in Paris.
I’m listening to the Pharoah Sanders classic, “ The Creator has a Master Plan” as I type this.
There was a time, when peace was on the earth And joy and happiness did reign and each man knew his worth In my heart how I yearn for that spirit's return
And I cry, as time flies
Om, Om
There is a place where love forever shines
And rainbows are the shadows of a presence so divine And the glow of that love lights the heavens above And it's free, can't you see, come with me
The creator has a master plan Peace and happiness for every man The creator has a working plan
Peace and happiness for every man The creator makes but one demand Happiness through all the land
Five former NFL players sit around a table talking about the moment they knew. “My knee stopped working. I couldn’t bend my leg anymore,” says Dedrick Roper, an ex-linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles whose last game was in the 2007 preseason. Doctors drained his knee and saw floating cartilage, the sign of a tear. Roper spent eight months rehabbing. “I was in probably the best shape of my life,” he says. “Last day of training, I started running, and my knee just blew up.”
The story was much the same for Mark Clayton, a former wide receiver with the Baltimore Ravens and St. Louis Rams, and Moses Moreno, a quarterback for the Chicago Bears and San Diego Chargers: injury, rehab, reinjury, the end. Ryan McNeil, a one-time Pro Bowl defensive back who played for six teams over 10 years, decided to retire when only bad teams were calling with offers. A failed physical closed the door for Babatunde Oshinowo, a defensive tackle who made the roster for the Bears and the Cleveland Browns.
In a nation troubled by corruption, blackouts and the scourge of Boko Haram, stand-up comics are mining misery for laughs and are more popular than ever. New York Times: Nigeria’s Comics Pull Punch Lines From Deeper Social Ills.
The armed robbers were having a field day, Ali Baba exclaimed to a large auditorium of lawyers. It was so bad that the thieves struck every car along a deeply potholed road — that is, until a former governor came along.
“They looked at him, and said he should drive on,” he said as the crowd grew silent. “The other armed robber said, ‘Why? Why did you let that car go?’ ”
“ ‘Esprit de corps’ ” — a camaraderie among brothers — he said, delivering the punch line and unleashing roars of laughter throughout the audience.
Forget crooked politicians, daily blackouts, long lines at gas stations or even the scourge of Boko Haram here in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Despite the litany of social ills and troubles — or maybe because of them — Nigeria has never laughed harder.
Comedy here is booming. Top comics have become, in a few short years, among Nigeria’s most successful entertainers and now perform throughout Africa.
Stand-up comedy, which emerged with Nigeria’s return to democratic rule in 1999, has become the country’s third-biggest form of entertainment after movies and music, industry experts say. It now draws countless aspiring comics to thriving comedy scenes in medium-size cities and to the country’s center of laughter here in Lagos.
Gloomy news from Transparency International, one in five Africans paid a bribe last year. The Economist: The scale of corruption in Africa.
The trouble is not discrimination, but rather that police officers stop motorists on flimsy pretexts in the hope of extracting bribes. In Kenya, for example, motoring offences necessitate paying bail and turning up at court. Unsurprisingly, then, a police officer catching someone making a wrong turn or with a broken rear light has quite a lot of leverage. Pay a few thousand Kenyan shillings now (about $30) and maybe you won’t have to go to court. For this reason, bookshops in Nairobi all sell miniature copies of the Kenyan Highway Code that harassed drivers can pull out and use to defend themselves.
Such corruption annoys the rich (at least those who don’t themselves benefit) but makes life miserable for ordinary people. Getting a place at a good school; getting permission to build on land you own; starting a business: all can involve paying people off. The cost to newly-developing economies is tremendous. The sheer injustice of the rich buying themselves out of criminal convictions while the poor get harsh treatment, is greater still.
Yet quantifying the reach of corruption is difficult. One attempt to do so was released on December 1st by Transparency International, a Berlin-based global NGO that focuses on reducing graft. It ran a survey in 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in 2014 and this year to attempt to measure the level of corruption.
According to the survey, 22% of Africans who had contact with public services admit to having paid a bribe in the past year. In Liberia the figure was 69%. In Kenya and Nigeria, two of the most important African economies, it was 37% and 43% respectively. Across the region, a majority of respondents said that they thought corruption had got worse in their country in the past year. In South Africa, the figure was 83%. The most affluent respondents were half as likely to have paid a bribe as the poorest. The type of bribes most commonly paid were to police officers and court officials. Half those forced to pay such bribes had done so more than once.
A few countries, though, stood out as remarkably clean. Just 1% of those surveyed in Botswana and Mauritius said they had paid a bribe, a share comparable to that in the developed world. In the former, 54% of respondents said that they thought the government was doing a good job in fighting corruption, far more than in any other country surveyed, and 72% that ordinary people could make a difference in that fight. With a per-capita income of roughly $17,000, Botswana is also one of Africa’s richest countries.
In the 60s and 70s, Ronnie Kasrils sent young white Londoners to South Africa to detonate bombs filled with pro-ANC leaflets. He reflects on the success of his secret war. The Guardian: The leaflet bombers: the British recruits who fought apartheid from within.
One day on Hampstead Heath in London nearly 50 years ago, Ronnie Kasrils nearly blew himself up. The freedom fighter, who would go on to become a minister in Nelson Mandela’s first government, was testing out an initiative in the secret war against white rule in South Africa – a home-made bomb combining gunpowder and a bucket holding hundreds of anti-apartheid leaflets.
“It required quite a lot of technology to get a rocket with 500 leaflets 20 metres into the sky,” Kasrils, now 77, recalls. “We used to go to parks in London at quiet times to experiment. One day, one went off course and came straight towards us. We dived behind a tree. Otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”
By “we”, he means a small group of exiled South African men and women operating from a flat over a shop in Golders Green in north London and a room in Goodge Street. They had been sent to Britain in 1965 by African National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Tambo, tasked with producing propaganda showing that the fight against apartheid wasn’t over. At the time, the ANC appeared to be crushed – it was banned in South Africa, Nelson Mandela and other leaders were in jail, Tambo was in exile in Zambia, and its underground seemed to have been wiped out. “We needed to show the oppressed of South Africa that we were still in business,” says Kasrils.
To do so, he attempted to do something that has remained a secret for the best part of four decades – recruit white British men and women to go to South Africa and set off bombs. “Apartheid, like any racist doctrine, presumed that all white people were natural allies. Hence suspicion was very low with regard to ‘caucasian’ visitors from abroad,” Kasrils explains. His idea was that young men and women would travel to South Africa pretending to be honeymooners, business trippers and tourists. They would explode homemade leaflet bombs, unfurl banners, and play rousing speeches to large crowds from improvised sound systems.
From her attorney’s statement: “She had the opportunity to ask the grand jury to consider whether it could possibly be ‘reasonable’ or ‘justifiable’ for officers to speed across the grass when driveways were nearby, rush up to Tamir and shoot him immediately.” ColorLines: Tamir Rice’s Mother Testifies Before Grand Jury.
More than a year after her 12-year-old son, Tamir Rice, was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer, Samaria Rice appeared before a grand jury yesterday (November 30). Local news station WKYCreports that she was invited, not subpoenaed, which put the decision to appear in Rice’s hands. She did not speak to press before or after her testimony, but family attorney Subodh Chandra issued the following statement:
Today, Samaria Rice and two of her children had the opportunity to tell a grand jury about the horror they experienced on November 22, 2015, when Cleveland police officers rushed upon and shot their beloved son and brother
. Ms. Rice told the grand jury about how she learned about the police shooting of her 12-year-old son and what a gentle, loving, and kind soul her child was to his family and friends. She had the opportunity to ask the grand jury to consider whether it could possibly be “reasonable” or “justifiable” for officers to speed across the grass when driveways were nearby, rush up to Tamir and shoot him immediately. She believes that the answer is plainly no, and hopes and prays that the grand jury agrees that there is probable cause to indict the officers and hold them accountable for her son's death.
Killer Mike and the return of the politically engaged rapper. The New Republic: Rebel without a pause.
On the night of November 24, 2014, Killer Mike was at the Ready Room, a concert hall in central St. Louis, getting ready to perform with El-P, or Jaime Meline, the white rapper who makes up the other half of the critically acclaimed rap duo Run the Jewels. Earlier that evening, a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, announced it had declined to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. Killer Mike addressed the decision from the stage:
I got kicked on my ass when I listened to that prosecutor. You motherfuckers got me today, I knew it was coming … when Eric Holder decided to resign. … You motherfuckers got me today. You kicked me on my ass today, because I have a 20-year-old son and a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them today. … It is not about race, it is not about class, it is not about color. It is about what they killed him for: It is about poverty, it is about greed, and it is about a war machine. It is us against the motherfucking machine.
The show began, and by night’s end, a fan had posted online a video of Killer Mike’s speech; it went viral. Pitchfork, Spin, Mother Jones, Deadspin, Slate, and The Huffington Post all covered his remarks, as did a wide array of rap blogs and web sites. The New York Times framed Killer Mike as an example of African American rappers distancing themselves from Jay Z-esque financial boasts in favor of “laying bare their innermost struggles.” The Times compared Killer Mike to Kanye West, who in 2005 famously reacted to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy by saying George W. Bush didn’t care about black people.
Killer Mike, 40, was not an unknown figure in the rap world. He had been performing, on his own and in different groups, since he was a teenager. His father was a police officer and his mother a florist until “she got into selling a little coke on the side,” as Killer Mike put it to the Portland Mercury, and he got his start as a member of an Atlanta rap group called the Slumlordz. After a yearlong stint at Morehouse College, where he studied religion and philosophy before dropping out, Killer Mike focused on the group. He got his first big break in 1994, when he befriended Big Boi, from the rap group Outkast. After signing with Outkast’s record imprint, Aquemini, in 2000, Killer Mike appeared on Outkast’s Grammy-winning album, Stankonia, and Speakerboxxx/ The Love Below, the group’s 2003 genre-changing hit.
Killer Mike’s work has always, at least in part, taken on political themes. (It is alsofun. And funny. Killer Mike does dick jokes better than almost anyone, and in October, Run the Jewels released Meow the Jewels, a rerecording of their second album, Run the Jewels 2, made entirely with cat noises. Proceeds from the album will go to a foundation to benefit families who have lost members to police violence.) His first two solo albums, Monster (2003) and I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind (2006), addressed police brutality, particularly the killing of Sean Bell, who was shot by police at his bachelor party in Queens, New York. Yet few people would have called Killer Mike a “political rapper” or even a particularly socially conscious one, even though his songs, playful and strange, often took on current events—on “That’s Life,”from Grind, he raps about how he “dissed Oprah,” lamenting that he never got to “Cruise like Tom through the slums / Where the education’s poor and the children growing dumb.” It’s just that he was a relatively peripheral figure in rap, well-known, perhaps, but certainly not an icon worthy of mention in the same hyped breath as Kanye West.
That changed after St. Louis. People outside of the rap world began to notice that the depth of Killer Mike’s thoughts weren’t limited to rhymes. He wrote op-eds on police brutality and the legitimacy of protest in Baltimore for Billboard. He gave interviews to NPR and PBS, lectured to students at NYU, MIT, and the University of Cincinnati, and made an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher. (On the show, he called Bill O’Reilly “more full of shit than an outhouse.”) He joined Arianna Huffington as her guest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In one BBC interview, he compared the uprising in Ferguson to the Boston Tea Party: “Riots work,” he said. “I’m an American because of that riot.” Killer Mike had achieved a new level of fame, one reached not because of musical talent so much as a profound willingness to engage with contemporary unrest.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam Black Kos Poetry Editor
Holidays often are just mere excuses to gather a far-flung family back home and that is good. Home and Family is where we learned to walk, where we spread our wings and from where we flew to climes far, far away.
It was cousin Alvin who stole the liquor, slipped down Aunt Mabie's steps on the ice,
fresh from jail for some small crime.
Alvin liked to make us laugh while he took
the liquor or other things we did not see,
in Aunt Mabie's with her floors polished,
wood she polished on her hands and knees
until they were truth itself and slippery
enough to trick you, Aunt Mabie who loved
her Calvert Extra and loved the bright inside
of family, the way we come connected in webs,
born in clusters of promises, dotted
with spots that mark our place in the karma
of good times, good times in the long ribbon
of being colored I learned when colored
had just given way to Negro and Negro was
leaving us because blackness chased it out
of the house, made it slip on the ice, fall
down and spill N-e-g-r-o all over the sidewalk
until we were proud in a new avenue of pride,
as thick as the scrapple on Saturday morning
with King syrup, in the good times, between
the strikes and layoffs at the mills when work
was too slack, and Pop sat around pretending
not to worry, not to let the stream of sweat
he wiped from his head be anything except
the natural way of things, keeping his habits,
the paper in his chair by the window, the radio
with the Orioles, with Earl Weaver the screamer
and Frank Robinson the gentle black man,
keeping his habits, Mama keeping hers,
the WSID gospel in the mornings, dusting
the encyclopedias she got from the A&P,
collecting the secrets of neighbors, holding
marriages together, putting golden silence
on children who took the wrong turns, broke
the laws of getting up and getting down
on your knees. These brittle things we call
memories rise up, like the aroma of scrapple,
beauty and ugliness, life's mix
where the hard and painful things from folk
who know no boundaries live beside
the bright eyes that look into each other, searching their pupils for paths to prayer.
-- Afaa Michael Weaver
"Scrapple"