Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

A touching tribute and a much needed plea for humility

Islamic comedian (and, no, that's not an oxymoron, or at least shouldn't be) Azhar Usman wrote a powerful, soul-searching tribute to Imam W.D. Mohammed after attending the great man's funeral. It lays bare the indignities and neglect that African-American Muslims have all too often endured at the hands of upwardly mobile and status-conscious immigrant (and Caucasian--see below) Muslims in North America.

Here is an excerpt from Br. Azhar's touching and much needed jeremiad against snobbery and ethnic chauvinism within the Muslim community in "An Apology: Heartfelt reflections on the passing of a legendary Blackamerican Muslim leader":

I would like to unburden myself of something that has been sitting like a ton of bricks on my heart for my entire life. I want to apologize to my Blackamerican brothers and sisters in Islam. I know that this apology may not mean very much; and I know that our American Muslim communities have a LONG way to go before we can have truly healthy political conciliation and de-racialized religious cooperation; and I know that I am not the one who is responsible for so much of the historical wrongdoing of so-called “immigrant Muslims”—wrongdoings that have been so hurtful, and insulting, and degrading, and disrespectful, and dismissive, and marginalizing, and often downright dehumanizing.

It's good to see that an up and coming leader like him not only gets the critical issues at stake here, but, masha'Allah, has the humility and courage to call us[*] out for not doing right by WDM and African-American Muslims in general. As people like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, fellow Muslim Dave Chappelle and even--if in his own apolitical, narcissistic way--Jerry Seinfeld  have demonstrated, comics are often the most insightful of social observers, so I'm not surprised.

I'm reminded of the great Christian theologian H. Richard Neibuhr, who fiercely attacked the phenomenon of denominationalism in American Prostestantism, which he saw if I'm not mistaken as the de facto re-imposition of Jim Crow-style segregation on American religious life. He understood, as we should, that consistently choosing to associate with "one's own kind" is only innocent and ethically neutral when all parties have the same access to resources and privilege that you enjoy (which is why, incidentally, minority-only institutions do not pose the same ethical quandry--members of majority groups do not need access to them to enjoy those basic rights, which they inherit by virtue of their background).

It's also heartening to see a discussion by a Muslim of the  ennobling power of apologies. A lot of Muslims today seem to think that apologies are a sign of weakness, when they quite to the contrary are its polar opposite. Real men--Ever notice how the Latin word "virtue"  essentially means manhood; vir is Latin for "man"--and real leaders apologize or at least know they ought to do so when they screw up, but I digress.

Putting aside the indeed sad and scandalous history of neglect of this great man and his inspiring community, the greatest lesson to be learned from his story IMO is that the guy with the grandiloquent khutbahs, perfectly nasalized Arabic and a stack of learned citations isn't always right. Unlike so many contemporary Muslims who seem to think that Pharisaic legalism is the sum of all virtue in Islam, Imam W.D. Mohammed didn't apologize for resorting to common sense when he encountered new challenges or found inherited customs designed for vastly different circumstances inadequate for the needs of his flock in an urban American milieu.

 May Allah bless him and forgive his sins and grant us all the wisdom and humility to learn from his example.

I also came across another tribute that is thought-provoking in a rather different way. It touches on how complex and far-reaching WDM's influence has been on Blackamerican Islam.  In his respectful assessment of WDM's achievements, Temple University professor Mark Lamont Hill points out in "R.I.P. Warith Deen Muhammad"  how some observers feel his embrace of Sunni Islam had the unintended effect of taking the wind of the sails of such movements as agents of political change.

In many ways, Warith Deen Mohammed’s ascendance within the ranks of American Islam marked the first major blow to the Nation of Islam’s power in America. As the son of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Warith Deen assumed the reigns of the organization after his father’s death in 1975. Soon after, he shifted the name and mission of the organization, slowly shifting it from a hybrid of Christianity, Islam, and Black Nationalism to a more mainstream form of Sunni Islam. For some, Warith Deen’s moves were a literal godsend to Black Muslims in America, redirecting them from hatred and heresy (their words, not mine!) to a newfound place of truth, orthodoxy, and global community. To others, Mohammed took the political and cultural teeth out of the Black Muslim movement, effectively undermining the extraordinary work of Elijah Muhammad, one of the most influential, innovative, and woefully underappreciated figures in American history. At the end of the day, neither description fully captures the complexity and significance of Warith Deen Muhammed. 

Emphasis added.  I have nothing but good things to say about about the Imam's impact, but it's interesting to see how differently WDM's transformation of NOI can look to people in other strands of Black Nationalism.

Yikes, it's 3 AM. I am going to be a zombie for sehri in, gulp, 2 hours.  Ah, the wicked wages of late-night blogging. My sins will be punished by my 2 1/2 year old when she jumps out of bed, ready to rumble, at 7:30 AM sharp.

[* ] By "us", that I mean Euro-American Muslims no less than those of immigrant extraction. Discussions of the tragic immigrant/black divide within the Muslim community often leave the impression that Euro-Americans are somehow  unimplicated in all this, which I think is reactionary hogwash. Far from being above the fray, most of us white Musilms are just as eager to move up the social totem pole towards "authentic" (read: foreign) Muslim-ness and distance ourselves socially from from those allegedly less traditional majority-African-American communities.

Unlike them, we arrive in the Muslim community with all the social benefits of whiteness and in any case are afforded the opportunity to assimiliate into and align ourselves with one of the traditional ethnic blocs that dominate the community. And most of us avail ourselves of that of that option with gusto, high-tailing it to the suburban, immigrant doctor and engineer-led mosques as soon as we find their coordinates.

"White flight" meets the Ummah.

Round-up of coverage of Imam W.D. Mohammed's passing

Here are, in no particular order, some recent blog postings and articles in the MSM on the death and/or moving funeral of Imam W.D. Mohammed. (In a one or two cases, the post was very short, so I linked more for the comments.)

Islamosphere:

1. Zahed Amanullah. "The Imam Cares" (alt.muslim)
2. Seeker's Digest: "Passing of Imam WD Mohammed - The Death of a Great Leader of Islam in the West"
3. Islamicate: "Warith Dean Mohammed is Dead"
4. SaqibSaab at Muslim Matters: "Thoughts After Attending The Janazah of Imam W. D. Mohammed" [Reflections by an American Muslim of immigrant background.]
5. Rickshaw Diaries: "RIP: Imam W. Deen Muhammad"
6. Koonj:  "Imam Warith Deen Muhammad: a leader among leaders"
7. Just Another Angry Black Muslim Woman? "Death of a Pioneer: Warith Deen Muhammad October 30, 1933-Sept.9, 2008"
8. SunniSister: Imam Warith Deen
9. ThirdResurrection: w.d. mohammed dies
10. Tariq Nelson: "W Deen Mohammed 1933-2008"
11. Akram's Razor (moi):  "Imam W.D. Mohammed has left us" 
12. Azhar Usman: "An Apology: Heartfelt reflections on the passing of a legendary Blackamerican Muslim leader" [A must read!]
13. Dynamite Soul: "A word about Imam Warith Deen Mohammad"
14. Imam Zaid Shakir:  "Imam Warith Deen Muhammad (1933-2008)"
15. Sisterdoc: "Peace and Blessings Imam W.D. Mohammed-R.I.P."
16. The Manrilla Blog:  "Imâm W. D. Mohammed and The Third Resurrection by Dr. Sherman Jackson" [A must read!]
    

 Rest of the Blogosphere:

1. Mata H at Blogher: "The death of Imam W. Deen Mohammed and 'A Summit on Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul'"
   [Talks about how beloved the Imam was in interfaith circles.]
   
2. David Waters: "W.D. Mohammed's Spiritual Maturity" (On Faith, The Washington Post's religion blog)
3. Marc Lamont Hill: "R.I.P. Warith Deen Muhammad"
   [Interesting reflections on the political consequences of WDM's embrace of religion over  ideology for not only the Nation of Islam but  Blackamerican Islam in general). ]
4. John Esposito: "W.D. Mohammed: A Witness for True Islam"  (On Faith, The Washington Post's  religion blog)
5. A. Serwer: "W.D. Mohammed Dies" (Tapped, group blog of The American Prospect)

MSM:

1. Michelle Gallardo. "Prayer services for Imam W. D. Mohammed" (a Chicago TV station)
2. Margaret Ramirez and Noreen Ahmed-Ullah. "Thousands gather in Villa Park for funeral of Imam W. Deen Mohammed" (Chicago Tribune)
3. Margaret Ramirez, Manya A. Brachear and Ron Grossman.
   
4. "Muslim America's rebellious son" (The Chicago Tribune) 
5. Sophia Tarteen: "Former Nation of Islam leader W.D. Mohammed dies" (Associated Press)
6. Niraj Warikoo: "Muslim leader Warith Deen Mohammed dies" (FREEP)
7. Patricia Sullivan: "W.D. Mohammed; Changed Muslim Movement in U.S." (Washington Post)
8. Time Online: "Imam W. D. Mohammed: influential US Sunni Muslim leader"
9. Malise Ruthven: "Imam who succeeded his father as leader of the Nation of Islam" (The Guardian)
10. Salim Muwakkil (brief interview on NPR's "Tell Me More")

Misc.

1. A guest book dedicated to the memory of Imam W.D. Mohammed
2. An audio recording of the Muslim Journal's press conference
   
3. "This Far by Faith: Warith Deen Muhammad" , an episode of a PBS series on great religious leaders dedicated to WDM
4. Taylor Branch: "The Anointed Son: The story behind W.D. Mohammed's momentous break with his father and his alliance with Malcolm X."  (Beliefnet)
5. A bio of WDM at an Atlanta mosque.

Please let me know if I've overlooked something worthwhile, folks.

Back to slinging C#.

P.S. I will continue to update this as I find new links.

P.P.S. My apologies for not giving hat tips for some of these. I've looked at so many blogs over the last few days and done so many web searches that I simply can't keep track of where I found what.  Feel free to help yourself to mine.

Imam W.D. Mohammed has left us

If you haven't heard, I'm sorry to inform you that a great American leader has left us.  Imam Warith Deen Mohammed passed away yesterday.  May Allah grant him paradise, give strength to his family and comfort the many who will be devastated by his departure from this plane.

Imam Mohammed is best known outside the Muslim community for courageously repudiating the racialized theology of the original Nation of Islam and leading its community into Sunni Islam after he took over its leadership upon the death of his father, Elijah Muhammad.

But that's just the beginning of the story. It's not a story I could do any justice, so let me just say since that fateful day he has, I think, been the preeminent African American Muslim leader, one of America's most important spiritual leaders, and the often unsung (not to mention occasionally maligned) hero of Muslim integration into American life (e.g., he gave the first Islamic prayer in the U.S. Senate, in 1990).

Imam Mohammed was a leader in the fullest sense of the word, and he took a lot of heat for it. (The sniping against him always outraged me.) Back when many prominent North American Muslim leaders were, let's face it, high on various sterile imported ideologies that impair one's rational faculties and narrow one's vision of the human family, Imam Mohammed was preaching his own--if I may borrow a metaphor from a leading voice of reform today-- "radical middle way". He was promoting common sense, moderation and dialogue at a time when none of these were politically correct in wide swathes of the community.  He didn't fall for all this pseudo-intellectual junk theology that so many of us are still painfully shaking off today.

As we celebrate this humble, unassuming man's momentous achievements we'd be remiss not to pause and ponder how so many of his once vocal critics have either been consigned to the dust bin of history (for example, these jokers, or these schizophrenic dinosaurs) or have been forced by history to hastily reinvent themselves in his mold in recent years (e.g., yesterday's critics of Muslim involvement with  democracy and the "Kuffar" who are today's most eager participants in post-9/11 interfaith dialogue).  No one is perfect, we all have our limitations, and no leader can avoid mistakes, but overall he was far ahead of his time--he got the biggest challenges facing American Muslims before they were even on the radar screen of many other leaders who took him to task for dogmatic technicalities--while so many of those who attacked him were, in contrast, holding theirs back.

Granted, for years he has been rightly praised across the spectrum of Muslim America, but it's a shame it took, as the saying goes, so long for this prophet to be fully accepted by his own people. Imagine how much good he could have done if all these  more "learned" traditional scholars and leaders that gave him (and the balanced and dynamic community he led) short shrift for so long had had the humility to give serious thought to his deceptively simple and profound vision of common sense, dialogue and down-home ihsan, say, a decade earlier?

Inna lillahi wa innaa ilayhi rajioon. From God we come and to Him we return.

His janaza (funeral) service will be streamed live today by the Muslim Journal at 1:45 PM Central Time.

NYT on African-American Jews

There's a very interesting piece in the NYT on African-American Jews, who struggle for acceptance in the broader Jewish community.

Black Rabbi Reaches Out to Mainstream of His Faith - New York Times

The touching video report that accompanies it is worth watching, as well.

My post on MLK at Religion Dispatches

I have a post at Religion Dispatches on the perverse ironies of the unspoken complacency with which the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is often celebrated.

Here's the final paragraph.

Religion Dispatches - MLK's 'Dream' Unrealized and Undigested

It seems to me that given America's glaring gaps today in economic justice at home and principled, constructive involvement in the outside world, King's "Dream" speech should if anything play as a stinging reminder of how little of his mission has been fulfilled. Instead, his stirring words are more often than not deployed not as a call for renewed introspection or commitment to equality, but as a self-congratulatory coda to America's modern social history that seems highly premature -- like those iconic feminist-themed Virginia Slims billboards of the past -- not to mention fundamentally at odds with the message of the man and the holiday being celebrated. Like the self-satisfied Virginia Slims billboards of the past, in some respects we've come a long way, Baby, but the fact that we've reduced Reverend King's holistic and unapologetically revolutionary message to the toothless, politically correct sermonizing of a Benetton commercial shows that his dream remains more than unfulfilled -- it remains scandalously undigested.

The Zeleza Post on today's "sanitation" of Martin Luther King

Do read this bracing and lyrical meditation on the misappropriation of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in American popular culture and politics.

Remembering Martin Luther King: Beyond the Sanitization of a Dreamer | The Zeleza Post

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When outsiders forget their place

I expect the occasional troll to drop by, especially given how I openly mock some of the Beltway's most sacred cows (e.g., the so-called War on Terror).  But even the most obnoxious trolls generally pick fights over substantive issues.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself in a spat with somebody over my use of Arabic words in my posts.  Yes, someone--and a blogger who evidently fancies himself an informed firsthand observer of the Middle East and Islam--was outraged at my use of common Islamic words and phrases such as din ("religion") and Suratul Fatihah ("the Opening Chapter" of the Quran) in my post on sectarianism in Pakistan ("Barelvis and Deobandis, still takfir-crazy after all these years").

We've gone back and forth a bit.  I dismantled his arguments and implicit assumptions.  I think he ended up looking rather silly and ill-informed and, judging by the guffaws of onlookers, I don't think alone in that perception.

I'm quite struck by the presumption, rudeness and strikingly anachronistic provincialism of this gentleman's complaint.  A non-Muslim and a person who did not grow up in a Muslim cultural environment feels he can lecture me--a person who grew up in the Muslim community in the midst of a discussion with other Muslims--about using overly "ethnic" language.  Moreover, he is so closed to other cultures that he feels my exotic jargon an assault on native sensibilities that justifies a rude intervention.   It's fascinating.  Archie Bunker lives on in the Blogosphere, and among "allies".

The bottom line is that, whatever he thinks, this is none of his business.  He has no more standing to whine about whether Muslims confuse him by saying Suratul Fatihah rather than blandly intoning "The Opening Chapter" than I have a right to complain about all these uppity Latinos who go around confusing the uneducated by wishing each other Felix Navidad instead of "Merry Christmas" like proper WASPs. 

I had moved on, both because of how trivial this matter is and because he never mustered a coherent rebuttal to my points, but now he's back and incensed enough to escalate it by posting a slam on his blog.

Once again, the mix of half-digested facts, unrepentant boorishness, and a neo-Victorian penchant for half-baked declarations about other cultures raises its ugly but psychologically intriguing head. Reading this condescending lecture to brown people over their supposed bastardization of the Queen's English you find yourself expecting it to close with "Rule Britannia!"

Anyway, here is his latest spitball (to call this anemic response a "salvo" would be flagrant hyperbole to which he'd undoubtedly be the first to object on semantic grounds).

Lounsbury: Razor's and Preciousness, or I'm so very Muslim posturing

Tardily, but I thought I would share this. Of course I am right, as always, but I am sure many will disagree with my viewpoint but frankly I am tired of reading Muslim [it seems esp. an Indo-Pak non-native Arab speaker disease] writing in English that pretentiously uses Arab-lish translits for religious terms that are perfectly adequately experessed in ordinary Enlgish  Worse, the idiotic responses pretending to tell me how "Muslims" speak about such issues (amusing pretention that), or trying to imply a lack of familiarity - rather than grasping the unnecessary self-segregation and foolish pretentiousness of injecting such terms.

In my responses on my blog, I ran through the most glaring problems with his argument, but this latest bit got me thinking about a less obvious but equally pervasive fallacy implicit in this thinking:  Namely, the linguistically and sociologically clueless assumption that the stylistic norms of Arabs are normative for  Arabic loan words or expressions in English because Arabs are native speakers of Arabic.

The linguistic naivete of this expectation is quite striking, as is the way it repackages the widespread stereotype that Islam is an "Arab" religion.  Never mind, says Lounsbury, that few Arabs speak English as a second much less first language--their usage of these terms in Arabic is what should determine our usage in English.  As I noted in my comment below, it's like looking at contemporary French to determine how to use an expression like double entendre in English.  In English it means something very specific, whereas in French it means a number of things. 

This Arabo-centric perspective is also reminiscent in its snobbery of the longstanding tradition  of imposing Latin style on English, despite the fact that it is a German language.  Just as patrician grammarians long claimed--utterly and indisputably incorrectly, as the rule applies only to Romance languages that descend from Latin--that it was grammatically incorrect to end a sentence in English with a conjunction, the gentleman is implicitly arguing Arabic stylistic usage is "classier" than all these "low" non-Arabic Islamic languages.    Again, a strikingly elitist and unscientific attitude that could've come out of some 19th century intellectual dilettante's musings on "Oriental" cultures.

Another intriguing tick to his latest riposte is how he interprets my use of a few mundane  and instantly recognizable expressions--it's not like I was dropping fancy terms from Islamic jurisprudence that rank & file Muslims might find confusing or stilted; these are as culturally familiar to Muslims around the globe as mazeltov or hallelujah are to even culturally illiterate Jews and Christians, respectively--is how it interprets speaking normally as feverish "posturing".  It appears that he is so insecure vis-a-vis subcultures that he finds it impossible that cultural differences could arise naturally and organically from one's background.  You see, it must be psychologically and/or politically motivated.  They're not just different--they're agressively imposing their fraudulent difference on us besieged white folk.

And such differences are inherently threatening to many.  Hence this neurotic need to police the Blogosphere and reestablish WASP cultural norms. 

Neurotic armchair shrink, psychoanalyze thyself. 

Here's the  comment I posted to his blog.

I see you wish to prolong this bizarre skirmish. I'm the rogue whose use of this overly "ethnic" jargon incurred your Archie Bunker-like wrath. People can weigh the arguments for themselves by looking at the comments on my post. Seems to me that you've been beat. BTW, I'm not only not South Asian--I'm a lilly white Bostonian of Scandinavian descent--but I'm a native speaker of "Muslim English". Aside from French and Danish (languages in which I've, incidentally, heard the very same expressions), it's what I grew up with and indeed all that I know. I most certainly grew up hearing the phrases that you find so artificial and pretentious around the Muslim community in Boston. How you figure that the usage of *Arabic speakers* is inherently normative for English speakers really eludes me. Seems to me that you turn to Arabs to find out how to speak Arabic, not English. Would you ask a Frenchman what "menage a trois" or "double entendre" mean in English just because the words are French? These loan words don't mean the same thing in their original language.

Shades of racism

I'd call this "disturbing news", but it's actually barely newsworthy to those who pay attention to such matters.

A depressing recent study put out by my school, the University of Georgia, reminds us of the many sinister permutations racism and racial preferences continue to take in the real world. 

The preference for lighter skin tone runs so deep, it appears, that lightskinned Blacks without qualifications are more likely to get hired than far more qualified Black men with dark skin. 

We're talking about men with mere BA's getting hired over those with MBAs.

The worst part is perhaps that this probably isn't primarily the result of conscious racism. (How many employers would consciously choose a novice with a BA over a seasoned professional with an MBA?)  It stems from unconscious assumptions about the correlation between skin color and personality characteristics.

Racism is alive and well, and it continues to impoverish the lives of millions. 

Athens, Ga. – Everyone knows about the insidious effects of racism in American society. But when it comes to the workplace, African Americans may face a more complex situation—the effects of their own skin tone.

For the first time, a study indicates that dark-skinned African Americans face a distinct disadvantage when applying for jobs, even if they have resumes superior to lighter-skinned black applicants.

Matthew Harrison, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia, presented his research today at the 66th annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Atlanta. Along with his faculty supervisor, Kecia Thomas, a professor of applied psychology and acting director of UGA’s Institute for African American Studies, Harrison undertook the first significant study of “colorism” in the American workplace.

“The findings in this study are, tragically, not too surprising,” said Harrison. “We found that a light-skinned black male can have only a bachelor’s degree and typical work experience and still be preferred over a dark-skinned black male with an MBA and past managerial positions, simply because expectations of the light-skinned black male are much higher, and he doesn’t appear as ‘menacing’ as the darker-skinned male applicant.”

Forgive the utterly random example, but perhaps this explains Haile Berry's disproportionate visibility in Hollywood?  I mean, her gifts as an actress are so painfully modest, and IMO she's by no means the prettiest African-American woman on the silver screen today.  Yet she probably gets more attention in popular culture than all other Black actresses combined.