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Race in the American Muslim Community:
An Interview with Dr. Sherman Jackson
Category: Muslims in America
Posted: Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Anas Coburn
December 25, 2008
The election of Barack Obama presents an opportunity for American Muslims to address issues of race in the community that have typically been minimized by many of the Muslims in the United States. Dr. Sherman Jackson identified some of the issues and their centrality to the establishment of Islam in America in this interview. The interview took place in the Summer of 2006, but is now more relevant than ever.
Who Defines Islamic Life in America?
Anas Coburn: What we are trying to do is somehow capture where we’re at as Muslims in this country, what are the big tasks before us, and what are the tasks we are ignoring?
Dr. Sherman Jackson: Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim ....
I think that the tasks or the challenges confronting the Muslims in America are multiple. I am not sure that I am comfortable in elevating one particular challenge to the top spot to the exclusion above all others. First of all, there is a political challenge, and that political challenge is both internal and external. Internally the political challenge is one of the age-old issue of ownership in Islam. Who, within the American Muslim community has the right or authority to contribute to a definition of a properly-constituted Islamic life in America? What is the criterion for determining who gets to contribute to that whole process? In the past, and still to a large extent today, there has been this presumed right on the part of immigrant Muslim populations, who are presumed and in many instances have presumed themselves to be knowledgeable of Islam, and Islam in a universal vein, that can be applied, as they understand it, virtually anywhere on the planet, in an undifferentiated way.
Anas: Wouldn’t you reject that notion?
SJ: I would reject that notion, but part of the problem is that rejecting that notion alone is not enough to solve the problem. To be quite honest, I don’t think that even arriving at the right answer is as important, at this point, as generating the contours of a discussion and a process that can lead to that right answer. In other words, if it is just my coming on the scene, and bashing everyone on the side of the head, and because they are all sprawled on the floor because I have bashed them on the head, so my view carries the day -- then you have not really empowered the community. Do you follow what I’m saying?
Anas: Yes, you’ve replaced one totalitarian discourse with another.
SJ: One totalitarian, one demonizing discourse has been replaced with another, and demonizing can be both overt and sometimes covert. You have not really raised the community to a level where it can consciously engage one another in a way that we are protected, both from our egos and our fears of each other, not to mention our fears arising in differential ways in which we relate to the outside world, here in America. So one of the real challenges is, how do we get beyond the fears, recriminations and arrogant presumptions that preclude any kind of serious kind of coming together, and serious discussion, albeit heated, that will enable us to distill the best possible ideas, given our circumstances in America, for the Muslim community here. Right now, what we have is that the Indo-Pakistanis have their discourse, the African Americans have theirs, the Arabs have theirs, the white man already has its. What we end up with is that the African Americans talk among themselves, talking about the Arabs and the Pakistanis and the whites, and the Pakistanis do the same thing talking about the Arabs, etc.; while the Arabs talk about how the others don’t understand Islam. There is no real coming together and testing of these ideas, and a process of breeding respect.
The first time I went to Egypt was about 24 years ago, and I still remember, I was still struggling with Arabic, but I could read, and I remember reading in Al Ahram, an article by a fellow named Yusuf al Badri. Yusuf al Badri, a sheikh who was one of the Ikhwan al Muslimeen, who had just gotten into the pariliament. Yusuf al Badri said in this article that before he got into the government, he used to think that all of those government people who disagreed with him were corrupt, not really serious about Deen. Once he got in a position where he was forced to engage some of these people, he was able to see that he was not the only one who had good ideas, and that in fact he was not the only one who was sincere about Islam. There were other people who were just as sincere as he was who had other ideas from which he could benefit.
We don’t have that yet. We still have a certain fear and a certain recrimination. For example the Blacks blame the Arabs and the Indo-Pakistanis. The Arabs and the Indo-Pakistanis feel that much of this criticism is unwarranted, and that it is coming at a time in which they are more specifically vulnerable, so it almost feels to them as if the Blacks are taking the side of the dominant American culture against them, even. You have all these feelings which preempt the possibilities of really coming together and having a serious, knockdown, drag-out debate, with mutual respect, a kind of discourse and debate that would enable Muslims to see where are we really here, in America. To me, that is more important than just coming up with the right idea. I am not interested in exchanging one form of totalitarianism with another. That’s one challenge.
The Centrality of Race in America
The other challenge is that Muslims have got to understand that whatever articulations of Islam they come up with, and this is part of what this debate is supposed to do, it has to get much more serious about, and sensitive to, the realities and the contours of American social, economic, political, cultural and psychological history. At the center of all of this is race. Part of the problem that is generated by this is that nobody wants to believe this, other than those who almost have to. Blacks are the most obvious identifiers of the significance of race in America. Everbody else, certainly before 9/11, thought of themselves as being on the right side of race in America or on their way to becoming so. I don’t think that a lot of people are willing to let go of that dream, present circumstances notwithstanding. People really believe that, this will pass and we will find ourselves in a position to get on the right side of America’s whiteness, and that aspect of the problem will go away.
Anas: When I think about this problem, I think part of what is difficult is that privilege is always invisible to those who possess it. That is part of how it works.
SJ: It is not always invisible. The more privilege becomes visible to its possessor, the greater the crisis its possessor finds himself in. This is one of the reasons many people have a strong response to Malcolm, because he called out many Arabs and Pakistanis on their sense of privilege that they had enjoyed invisibly. It made that privilege more visible.
Anas: Is it the case that using the term privilege is more understandable and less threatening, and therefore more likely to be heard, that talking about race?
SJ: No. I think that what privilege or the discourse of privilege will do is essentially enable us to dance around some of these issues. So for example you get what is to my mind this ridiculous discourse of class as opposed to race. Well, the two are co-terminal, so you end up with the same thing. We talk about privilege, for example and we say that Arabs, Pakistanis and Whites enjoy privilege that Blacks don’t. What is the basis of that privilege?
Anas: Race. But knowledge of Arabic has been a real advantage enjoyed by the Arabs.
SJ: What matters is the level of priority Islam has in one’s life. At this point in our history, the basic, fundamental meanings of Islam have already been articulated and translated. I don’t have to be an Arab to know you shouldn’t have girlfriends. You cannot drink wine. Caring for the poor and needy is a value in Islam. All of these things are known parts of the religion. You don’t need to be an Arab to know these things. If I want to make tafsir, or deliver fatwas on issues, then knowledge of Arabic and a number of other things becomes relevant. But at that point it is really a matter of personal commitment and devotion, not simply that one is an Arab. That may have had some relevance in the early days of Islam when the Muslims themselves were in the process of prioritizing the values of Islam. But now basic iman and the five pillars of Islam are known all over the world. I don’t have to be an Arab to know this.
We have to be careful about this. The way that Arab hegemony regarding Islam has worked in the United States has been problematic. I don’t want to use that as a broad brush to paint all Arabs or to render whatever positive contributions Arabs have made to an American Islamic discourse suspect. But I also don’t want to grant more of a presumption that their contributions are right or good or valuable just because they are Arab.
The Need for External Validation
Anas: But to be a Muslim in America is to give up privilege.
SJ: Yes. But what privilege are you giving up? I think that what being a Muslim in America really entails, is not so much that one must give up privilege: what we are giving up is a possibility of validation that we want. I don’t want to focus on the validation that is given by others. I want to focus on why does this validation have the value to me that it has? That is the spiritual work of the Muslim in America. In the name of Islam, Arabs, Indo-Pakistanis, Whites, and even a number of Blacks have shown that they are not willing to address that issue: Why is it so important to me to be validated by you?
Anas: Alfred Adler had a notion that the feeling of community was central to psychological health.
SJ: But they don’t have a feeling of community with the dominant white culture. All they get from them is a sense of acceptance, that one is no longer backward, subhuman, whatever. We’re not marrying their daughters, joining their country clubs. That is not happening. There is no sense of community there, it is all about validation. What we are doing in pursuit of that validation is forfeiting the opportunity for the kind of community you are talking about emerging among ourselves. You see this community in the Amish, for example. They could give a damn what you thought about them. Is there any higher, more healthy sense of community that you have seen than them? I am not talking about the substance, I’m not asking would you want to live a life like that. But why is it that the Amish woman can get up, put on her hairpiece, make a statement that my husband is the king of our palace, or whatever it is, and feel no need to have that validated by the dominant culture? Because she does not need to be validated by the dominated culture, she is not interacting with her sister and her brother under the gaze of the dominant culture. There is a sense in which you and I may even want to disassociate from each other under the gaze of the dominant culture, so what kind of community can we establish?
Anas: It is one thing for a mature adult to choose to undertake this spiritual work that you are talking about, but it is a tall order of business to ask your kids to make that choice.
SJ: I think you are absolutely right. It is a tall order of business, it is an almost impossible order of business, and our children for the most part cannot make that choice in a way that is healthy unless they are socialized in the context of the type of community that has been built by us whereby they inherit from us this absence of a need to validate themselves through they eyes of the dominant culture. That is not to say you cannot have healthy relations with the dominant culture. I am what I am, and I am self-validated in that regard. You are what you are, and I can like you, I can respect you, I can even love you, but what you think about my religion does not in itself make it any more or less true.
Anas: It seems like the experience of many Muslims is that the instantiation of Islam that other Muslims present is not mutually validating, and makes us even more worried.
SJ: That is the point that I’m making. What I first started out with is the necessity of discourse. That discourse is necessary in order to be able to chart a course towards the indigenization of Islam. The goal is for Anas Coburn to be white and Muslim comfortably, for Abdal Hakim Jackson to be black and Muslim comfortably, seeing no dichotomy, no contradiction, between being white and Muslim, or being black and Muslim. Nigerians see no contradiction. Neither do Bosnians. I was in the airport in Cairo, and there was whole group of Russians...white, whiter than you are. They were from Chechnya, and the women were wearing hijab, and they see no contraction between being white and being Muslim. That is the challenge. Unless that challenge is met, we will continue to have this psychological dislocation that leads to what Dubois calls double-consciousness whereby one leads one life struggling to be a Muslim, and at the same time struggling not to be a Muslim, and has half a heart in each of these enterprises. This is the real challenge.
This is the first challenge in my estimation for Islam in Amerca. I do not want to be misunderstood. I understand the immigrant community’s impulse, especially now. This is a community that has been misrepresented, they’ve been persecuted, they have been bludgeoned, they have been besmirched, they are now a pariah. One of their first priorities now is to ingratiate themselves with the dominant culture. But one must understand that that alone will not address the issue that we are talking about. And it will do nothing for their children. All it will do is ensure that you are not locked up and you are not deported. What is the reality of being Muslim as you move about in society? Ask any honest Muslim in America, what really is the advantage of going to Cairo, or Syria, or any of these other places. It is not that you are talking about some Islamic utopia. It is not that there is an “Islamic State.” It is the fact that you do not need to seek validation for being a Muslim from other than yourself. That is the real issue. The Muslim countries have all kinds of problems, but there is no sense of struggling to be and not to be a Muslim, unless of course you are operating, not under the gaze of dominant white America, but under the gaze of the dominant West, and now, all of a sudden, you will slip into it again. This is one of the reasons why this discourse has to be established.
Initiating a Discourse on Race among American Muslims
Anas: What is the format for this discourse? On what ground does it take place?
SJ: I don’t know. I think you need three kinds of people involved: scholars, activists, and the moneyed community. It is the moneyed community that can provide that space.
Anas: Are we misallocating our financial resources now?
SJ: I think a lot of the allocation of Muslim resources in America has more to do with monument-building than anything that will translate into something with real lasting benefit to Muslims. The intent of building all these monuments, these expensive masjids and so forth, is to say, “We are here, we have a presence now.” That is more for outside consumption. We are not really invested in building human capital. We need a controlled space where this kind of discourse can really take place. Where you get people who are even-handed and fair-minded, who will invite the salafis and the sufis to sit at the same table, recognizing that this is going to be a tough, tough, tough ride. But if we start today, in twenty years, even if we have not completely triumphed, there will be progress, and progress in the only direction that can really spell a more positive direction for us.
This is serious business. The scholars don’t have time. I don’t have time to sit back and set up a meeting like this. None of our scholars do. The moneyed community gets together, and they consult with some fair-minded Muslim scholars and intellectuals and find out who should be invited to be a part of this discourse and set something up – understanding that for the first five to ten years, this may feel like a big waste of time and money. There are no easy solutions here. You have people who are of different class, different race. Black Americans understand things about America instictively, that others will have to be here a century before they even begin to understand. The problem is that most people think, “Oh, that’s just a black perspective.” If you write a book, and I write a book, and Hamza Yusuf writes a book...what is that ultimately going to produce? That is the big challenge, that discourse. If I could come before a group of Muslims and say this: The addiction to external validation is to my mind nothing more or less than the continuation of the colonial era. If you do this, we will consider you modern. Even if it means stripping your women from their hijab, taking off your tarbouches, or whatever it means. It is not so much political or even legal, as it is, though I don’t like to use this word...it is spiritual, it is about the condition of hearts. And how do I arrive at that without myself degenerating into some kind of racist. In other words, for me to reject the need for you to validate me, that can either come saying “ I understand that my validation comes from God and comes from life of commitment to God. The biggest judgment for me is the Judgment of God. That is my validation, and that validation, because I am a human being too, is mediated through the social networks of the Muslim community, because they are the people who have the values that are reflective of what God says.” So it can either be a function of that, or it can simply be “I hate white people.” Or black people, or whatever. One has to be very careful about this whole enterprise. Without this issue somehow being addressed, the psychological fallout and dislocations within the Muslim community are going to continue and probably increase over the coming decades. There are powerful insights that we can gain from our tradition and from the discourse in the Muslim world. But I do not believe that there are any black-box solutions either in the Muslim tradition or the modern discourse in the Muslim world that can address and solve this problem for us here. I barely have time to even think about it myself. I’m thinking about my syllabi for the university, and deadlines for articles and so forth.
Anas: How much of that is a function of the dominant culture which values only that which is of economic value?
SJ: To some extent. Part of that is my fault. I have to prioritize myself, to say this is what is important and to which I will give attention. But compare for example, Muslim intellectual life, with say that of the neo-cons. That’s your competition. In terms of producing parameters that are going to define life, that is what our kids will be reading in the newspapers, seeing in the magazines and talk-shows, that is the stuff that is going to pervade the air that they breathe. We don’t have respectable counters to that, then we wonder why Muslims are going in all kinds of directions. There are more basic issues we have to face. Let’s face it, many of the Muslim immigrants come from very socially stratified societies, that’s very normal for them. I think, and that’s why we need this discourse, so someone can perhaps convince me otherwise, that this attitude they bring from highly stratified societies is very ill-suited to this environment, because it sets up additional barriers to this homogenizing effort that must take place, and at a time when we can ill afford it. Preserving the Pakistani community in America is fool’s gold. The Pakistani community is not big enough to preserve itself over the long run. Preserving the Arab community, as Muslims, is fool’s gold. Preserving the black community is fool’s gold. There has to be much more of a heterodyning process. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi said many years ago “You people need to start intermarrying.” In fact he was even talking about non-Muslims in order to start that process of heterodyning...of bringing people together whereby the interests and well-being of the Muslims are not isolatable any more in such a way a way that you can just drive them into a corner, bomb that corner and no one else is effected, nor will they shed a tear.
These are very serious issues. There are Muslims from the old world who don’t believe that Islam can assume any other shape, form or articulation than that which they grew up with, and the job they see themselves charged with here is to reproduce that here. That is a wrong-minded idea in my estimation, but how do you establish a discourse that would give a critique of that idea the kind of multiplier effect and drive it would take to actually have some impact. I don’t think we realize the extent to which our young people are afraid, frustrated and confused, and still deeply lacking that sense of community. We are not aware of it to the point that we don’t teach our children that, because our children even, are incredibly mean to each other, but all they are doing is modeling what they understand to be normative behavior. This is part of what has to be recognized as something necessary for a dignified American existence for Muslims. You may not have to teach your kids that kind of thing in Syria, but when you come to America you have to deprogram them so that the whole notion of ‘abd never even comes to their mind, let alone their tongue, because if it does, it will pre-empt if not destroy all opportunity for community-building beyond themselves. In this regard 9/11 has been a big blessing to us. That was the moment that drove home to all of the subsections of the Muslim community that “you are not self-sustaining.” These are serious issues. We can talk about the fiqhi issues, but people in their hearts and souls are dying inside.
The Need for Genuine Community
People are suffering. All they need in many instances, is a little bit of genuine community. Genuine, not the kind of community that is going to coddle you as a little token white boy. The kind of community that is going to love you, that will have an interest in you, that will accept you, that will criticize you, and put you in a position where you will happy enough to accept that criticism, whether justified, or unjustified. That’s what builds trust, the kind of community where, if I’ve got a problem, I can say, “Well, I’m going to go talk to Anas. He’s not going to BS me, I’m not going to overtake him, there is going to be a genuine give and take there.” I have said on many occasions, the Prophet, alayhi salaatu wa salaam, he had homeboys, not just followers. They were sahaba, ashabi, my friends, people who care about me, care about what I am going through, and I care about them. They will put it on the line for me, and I will put it on the line for them. In a human life, if you have five friends like that, you are a very wealthy man. That’s what I am talking about. The fiqh stuff we can handle later. We can handle a good majority of it now. That is not really the problem as I see it. It is these issues.
When you look at the women, they are being asked to take on an understanding of womanhood that is totally alien to them, with no real support in terms of how do I do this. I think in terms of the black church that I grew up with and the Muslim community now with regard to some of the women’s issues. Back then, I could overhear a young woman in the church going to some old woman in the church talking about problems with her husband, this, that, and the other thing, and you know it was a poor community so the issues are a bit different, but you know the woman says “Is he beatin’ on you.” “No.” “Is he payin’ the bills.” “Yeah.” “Is he running around on you?” “No.” “Chile, you got a good man.” That kind of reinforcement from the other women in the community, providing a living model of how you can come to terms with some of the issues you are dealing with. Many of our women don’t have that. All they have is feminist rhetoric that speaks only in terms of ideals, no grounding in reality necessarily.
The real concern when these things are brought up in the Muslim community, is “Don’t bring us any shame. Forget what you are going through.” Think of the private conversations that will go on among a bunch of guys in a barbershop, and think where in the Muslim community that kind of conversation can go on. That is the point that is being made. Are we ashab? Or are we just brothers, in the shallow sense of we just recognize each other as Muslims and nothing more.
Anas: It is a richness of social connection, beyond simply the overtly religious. It is what some characterize as social capital.
SJ: We have very little of that. This is why I lament, to some extent, what has happened to the black community within Islam. They had a social capital. They may not have been able to articulate it in Arabic, or cite hadith, but they had a social capital, a means of dealing with issues on a community level, they had a set of recognized expectations, and it was lost, and so now, what has replaced it? How do we get real? How do we get back to that level of comfort with oneself that you see reflected in hadith, in the way the companions lived with the Prophet. Not shame based, not concerned with what image of myself will I be projecting. I have a question, I want an answer. And he’s not going to lay a guilt-trip on me. How do we get that? It is a real challenge. Allah characterizes a party of the Jews in the Quran: “You think they are all together, and their hearts are disparate.” Who does that sound like? We all have to recognize a cultural price for being Muslim in America. A cultural price both in terms of levels of validation that you may or may not get from the dominant culture, and a cultural price in terms of what you will have to sacrifice in the public space. I cannot convert the public space of the Muslims into a black space. And you can’t convert it into a white space. And the Arabs should not expect to be able to convert it into an Arab space. That is very uncomfortable for us all, and that’s why we don’t go to that space.
Related Articles:
Obama, Race, and the Muslim Community, by Anas Coburn
Obama and American Muslims: The Way Forward, by Imam Zaid Shakir (audio file)
Muslim Americans: Between American Society and the American Story by Dr. Sherman Jackson
Reflections on Building Community, by Anas Coburn