SHERMAN A. JACKSON

  The article as it appears here is included in the conference papers of Muslims in the United States: Demography, Beliefs, Institutions (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003). A related article appears in the Fall, 2005, issue of Islamica Magazine, but for the best discussion of this subject, look for Professor Jackson's book, Islam and the Blackamerican: The Third Resurrection (Oxford UP, 2005). An interesting corollary to the present article might be Zaid Shakir's "Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and Blackness," in his recently published, Scattered Pictures (Zaytuna, 2005).

 In 1978, Edward Said published his now-famous Orientalism.¹ A Christian Palestinian, Said devoted Orientalism to exposing the manner in which the prejudices and power of Europe, and later the United States, created both a geographical entity called "the Orient" and a scholarly tradition of speaking and writing about it. This was not the Orient of Japan or China; this was the "Near East" and "Middle East." While Jews, Christians and others contributed to the cultures and history of this region, Islam and Muslims were the primary if not exclusive targets of Orientalism.

 As the incubator and projection of Western fears, desires, repressions and prejudices, occidental discourse about the Orient normalized a whole series of self-serving and condescending stereotypes about Arab and Muslim "Orientals." These, in turn, justified the propriety and inevitability of Western domination and privilege. This self-serving, power-driven psychological predisposition, deeply rooted and often consciously indulged, constituted what Said meant by Orientalism.

 Said noted that Orientalism was not a purely political affair, something that only Western governments and armies used against Oriental despots and their cowering subjects. Western intellectuals and academicians played a major role in the enterprise. Even when British, French or American scholars approached the Orient with no conscious political aims, they could neither transcend nor disengage themselves from the social, historical and institutional forces that shaped their mental schemas. "The Western scholar," wrote Said, "came up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second."² As an individual, s/he might look across the Atlantic or Mediterranean to the Orient; but as a Westerner, s/he could only look down from a self-described superior civilization, a perspective destined to shape the Orient into a projection of the most deeply ingrained Western fears, prejudices and obsessions.

 If White Westerners approached the Orient as Europeans and Americans, one would expect Blackamerican thinkers and scholars to approach it as Blackamericans.³ The meaning and implications of this would depend, of course, on where Blackamericans were in their own existential struggle and on what influence the Orient itself was perceived as exerting on their lives. Prior to the 1970s, what little role the Orient played in Blackamerican thought was almost exclusively positive. From the 1970s on, however, there was a palpable change in the image and status of the Arab/Muslim world among Blackamericans. The change coincided with the move of large numbers of Muslims from the Middle East and Asia to the United States, which produced a major shift in the priorities, sensibilities and image of Islam in this country.

 Whereas before the 1970s Islam in the United States had been dominated by a Black presence and thus a Black, American agenda, from the 1970s on, "real" Islam increasingly came to be perceived as the religion of Arabs and foreigners who were neither knowledgeable about nor genuinely interested in the realities of Blackamericans.With this development, Blackamericans who identified with Islam, especially Sunnis, came under increasing criticism as "cultural heretics": self-hating "wannabees" who had moved from the back of the bus to the back of the camel. This occurred in the context of the Blackamerican converts to Islam having defected either from the Black Church or some other Blackamerican movement. The result was that from the very beginning, certain elements within the Blackamerican community perceived Islam's gains as their own loss. Ultimately, all of this would culminate in the rise of Black Orientalism.

 Unlike Said's "White" Orientalism, the aim of Black Orientalism has nothing to do with a desire to control or dominate the Orient. Like Said's Orientalism, however, its target is emphatically Islam. Black Orientalism is essentially a reaction to the newly developed relationship among Islam, Blackamericans and the Muslim world. It has followed the shift from Black Religion to historical Islam as the basis of Islamic religious authority among Blackamerican Muslims. Its ultimate aim is to challenge, if not undermine, the esteem enjoyed by Islam in the Blackamerican community by projecting onto the Muslim world a set of images, perceptions, resentments and stereotypes that are far more the product of the Black experience in the United States than they are of any direct relationship with or knowledge of Islam and the Muslim world. By highlighting the purported historical race- prejudice of the Muslim world and, in some instances, the alleged responses to it, Black Orientalism seeks to impugn the propriety of the relationship between Islam and Blackamericans and ultimately to call into question Blackamerican Muslims' status as "authentic," loyal Blackamericans.

 In this essay, I trace the rise of Black Orientalism, its causes and nature, and its significance for American Islam. This will include a brief examination of the development of Islam among Blackamericans in order to place Black Orientalism in a meaningful historical context. It will be followed by a word about the shifts and dislocations in Blackamerican Islam that were engendered by the influx of Muslim immigrants to the United States following the changes in immigration quotas in 1965. I will then sharpen my definition of Black Orientalism, highlighting the distinction between it and valid criticisms of Arabs and/or Muslims. That will be followed by a brief, synecdochic response to one particular manifestation of Black Orientalism. I will conclude with a word about the significance of Black Orientalism for the present and future of Islam in the United States.

RELIGION, IDENTITY AND THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG

BLACKAMERICANS

 In tracing the history of Islam among Blackamericans, it is important to begin with the fact that the United States is unique among the great Western democracies in that a significant proportion of its Muslim population was born in this country. The spread of Islam among Blackamericans did not follow any of the patterns familiar to Islam in other parts of the world: it was not the result of immigration, conquest or the efforts of traveling Sufis. The rise of Islam among Blackamericans owes its impetus, rather, to a masterful feat of appropriation of the vehicle of Black Religion. The early Blackamerican "Islamizers," Noble Drew Ali and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, enlisted Islam not only as a strictly religious expression but as a basis for an alternative modality of American Blackness. Blackamericans at large came to see in this religion not only a path to spiritual salvation but a path to a more authentic Blackamerican self. Elijah Muhammad campaigned not only against Christianity but against those "finger-poppin', chittlin'-eatin', yes sa bossin' Negroes." Islam, in other words, as "the Black Man's Religion," was as much about identity and what E.E. Curtis IV refers to as "cultural nationalism" as it was about religion in a restricted sense.⁴

 This added dimension of being enlisted as the basis of an alternative modality of American Blackness is crucial to understanding the rise of Islam among Blackamericans. It is also critical, however, to a proper understanding of the rise of Black Orientalism. On the one hand, it was this dimension of Blackamerican Islam more than anything else that thrust it into competition with the Black Church and other Blackamerican movements. At the same time, it was precisely this dimension of Blackamerican Islam that was and remains neither understood nor appreciated by the immigrant Muslims who came to monopolize the authority to define a properly constituted Islamic life in the United States.

 In the face of this new, immigrant authority, purportedly grounded in the super-tradition of historical Islam, Blackamerican Muslims found themselves unable to address the realities of their lives in a manner that effectively served their needs or in terms that were likely to be recognized as Islamic. At the same time, this new ideological dependency left them unable to insulate the positive features of their Blackamerican culture from the hostile reflexes of an immigrant Islam that was still reacting to its nemesis: the modern West. All of this would leave Blackamerican Muslims open to the charge of being followers of a religion that countenanced, if it did not endorse, the devaluation, marginalization and subjugation of Blacks.

FROM BLACK RELIGION TO HISTORICAL ISLAM

 The history of Islam among Blackamericans begins, for all intents and purposes, in the early twentieth century, with the marriage of Islam and Black Religion. Black Religion, however, should not be understood to constitute a distinct religion per se but rather a religious orientation. It has no theology or orthodoxy; it has no institutionalized ecclesiastical order and no public or private liturgy. It has no foundational documents, like the Bible or the Baghavad Ghita, and no founding figures like Buddha or Zoroaster. The God of Black Religion is neither specifically Jesus, Yahweh or Allah. It is, rather, an abstract category into which any and all of these can be put. Black Religion can be described as the deism or natural religion of Blackamericans, a spontaneous folk-orientation grounded in the belief in a supernatural power yet uniquely focused on that power's manifestation as interventions in the crucible of American race relations.

 In short, Black Religion is a holy protest against White supremacy and its material effects. According to C. Eric Lincoln, its point of departure was American slavery, and had it not been for slavery, there would have been no Black Religion.⁵ The Black Church emerged out of the marriage between Black Religion and Protestantism and conferred a palpably religious dimension upon the Black struggle in the United States. Indeed, the Black Church remained the dominant host of Black Religion until the beginning of the twentieth century. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, however, Blackamericans began to migrate en masse from the South to Northern metropolises, where the relationship between the Black Church and Black Religion was ruptured and the latter was forced to look for new accommodations. Joseph R. Washington, Jr. described this alienation from the Black Church: Since the 1920s, black religion, the religion of the folk, has been dysfunctional.

 From this period on the once subordinate and latent stream of white Protestant evangelicalism has been dominant and manifest, relegating the uniqueness of black religion to verbal expression from the pulpit in such a way that action was stifled.⁶ The early "Islamizers," Noble Drew Ali and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, emerged in the context of this ruptured relationship between the Black Church and Black Religion, offering asylum to Black Religion in what they presented as Islam. By using Black Religion as a vehicle for appropriating Islam and making it meaningful and valuable to Blackamericans, these early Islamizers were able to popularize the religion and render it the cultural property of Blackamericans as a whole. The establishment of a sense of ownership was critical to the rising rate of Blackamerican conversion. It was also an important factor in the Islamizers' ability to influence Blackamerican culture at large. One sees signs of this in the newly developed disdain for pork or in the spread of Arabic names, in both their proper and bastardized forms (i.e., those of the a-ee-a pattern, such as Lakeesha, Tamika, Shameeka). In short, this historical feat of appropriation marked the true beginning of the history of Islam among Blackamericans and gave the religion roots in American soil. Indeed, without this historical achievement, it is doubtful that Islam would have come to enjoy its current success among Blackamericans.

 If only by default, Black Religion remained the primary means by which Blackamerican proto- and Sunni Islam validated itself until 1965, when the administration of Lyndon Johnson repealed the national origins law that had restricted immigration almost exclusively to Northern and Western Europeans. It was not the Qur'an or the Sunnah or books of law and exegesis that authenticated a view as Islamic, but the act of throwing off the yoke of White domination or the demand to conform to the dictates of the new persona of the dignified Black man. As long as this remained the case, Black Orientalism existed only as a cry on the margins of Blackamerica. With the repeal of the national origins law, however, and the massive influx of Muslims from the Middle East and Asia, a new basis of religious authority was introduced into American Islam. The primary authenticators of Islam were no longer Black Religion and Black Americans but, rather, immigrants who spoke in the name of the historical 'ulûm shar'îyah, or Islamic religious sciences. In addition to its impact on Blackamerican Muslims, this shift in the basis of Islamic religious authority effected a fundamental change in the attitude of Blackamerican non-Muslims towards the Arab/Muslim world.

 Prior to the shift from Black Religion to historical Islam, the Arab and Muslim worlds were invariably included as constituents of an idealized Third World, a regiment of Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, grinding out the universal ground-offensive against White supremacy and Western imperialism.⁷ After this shift, and the establishment of critical masses of immigrant Muslims in the United States, there was a growing number of Blackamerican scholars who denied the Arab and Muslim world this status and portrayed it instead as a precursor, partner or imitator of the West in its denigration and subjugation of Black people. Several works by Blackamerican writers from the early 1970s reflected this development: C.Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization; S. Maglangbayan, Garvey, Lumumba, and Malcolm: Black National-Separatists; Y. Ben-Jochannan, African Origins of Major Western Religions; and H. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Enemies:The Clash of Races.⁸ This was the beginning of Black Orientalism, a trend that has continued into the new millennium.

BLACK ORIENTALISM AND WHAT IT IS NOT

 Not every criticism of the stereotypes, prejudices and practices of Muslim Orientals is an expression of Black Orientalism. Valid criticism, however, is distinct from ideologically-driven denigration. The former is based on direct experience or knowledge of verifiable facts; the latter, on imagination, ideology and projection. When Blackamericans condemn the exploitative activities of (Muslim) Arab liquor-store magnates in the greater Detroit or Chicago areas, this is no more an exercise in anti-Muslim Black Orientalism than earlier critiques of Jewish slumlords were of anti-Semitism. If the old anti-miscegenation laws prove how deeply ingrained anti-Black racism was among American Whites, de facto anti-miscegenation sentiment among Muslim Orientals cannot be written off as a benign "cultural preference." In short, if the association among Islam, Blackamericans and the Muslim world should not cause wild and unwarranted projections, neither should it require turning a blind eye to real offenses experienced at first hand.

 Nor must Blackamerican criticism of Muslim Orientals be limited to contemporary facts or experience. The pre-modern Islamic legacy remains the repository of the greatest authority for contemporary Muslims and it continues to inform the thought and sensibilities of Islam in the United States. When we turn to this legacy, we find that Muslim legal, historical, exegetical and belle-lettristic literature are replete with anti-Black sentiment. It is neither Black Orientalism nor a manifestation of anti-Muslim bias to criticize and analyze such works but, on the contrary, such criticism and analysis is necessary for the establishment of a standard that can be applied fairly and consistently across the board.

 Consider the following example: in his famous Prolegomenon, Ibn Khaldûn (808/1406) says of Blacks in the southern portion of Africa that "they are not to be numbered among humans."⁹ The early Meccan jurist, Tâ'ûs, refused to attend weddings between a Black and White because, given his understanding of the Qur'ânic verse about the Satanic impulse to "change God's creation" (taghyîr khalq Allâh -- 4:119), he deemed them to be "unnatural."¹⁰ Numerous early Mâlikî jurists held, reportedly on the authority of Mâlik, that while under normal circumstances a valid marriage contract required that the woman be represented by a male relative (walî), this requirement could be relaxed in instances such as those where the woman hailed from lowly origins or was ugly or Black.¹¹ This, they argued, was because Blackness was an affliction that automatically reduced a woman's social standing.¹² Similarly, the twelfth/eighteenth century Mâlikî jurist, al-Dardîr, categorically affirms the unbelief (kufr) of any Muslim who claims that the Prophet Muhammad was Black.¹³

 Nothing would excuse the casual dismissal of such statements from White Americans or Europeans, nor should their authors' status as Muslim Orientals earn them such an exemption. Holding up such statements for comment and criticism is not Black Orientalism. It is, rather, responsible scholarship whose ultimate aim and effect should be to alert Muslims to the ways in which they have failed to live up to their own ideals.

 Having said this much, however, it must be acknowledged that critical references to statements and actions by Muslim Orientals can approach Black Orientalism. This is the case when they proceed on the uncritical assumption that what might be systemically racist comments in the context of the United States are isolated instances with other meanings in the context of another society. Race and color, in other words, are assumed to be consistent determinants of human relations and possibilities in Muslim society. In short, Black Orientalism implies not only that Muslim society produced expressions of race- or color-prejudice, but that such prejudice defined these societies and in so doing circumscribed the lives and possibilities of Black people within them.

 Among the strongest contentions giving currency to the assumption that Black life was circumscribed in Muslim society is the erroneous claim that Blacks in Islam were a slave class as they were in the United States. This not only adds credence to the notion that Black life was circumscribed, but confers upon all seemingly racially-biased statements and actions the appearance of being part of the ruling class effort to justify its domination over its subjugated wards. In point of fact, however, as every historian of Islam knows, most slaves in Muslim society were not Black but of Turkish origin, and there is no evidence that most Blacks were slaves.¹⁴  Even assuming that Blacks were a slave class in Muslim society, however, there is, as Ira Berlin notes in Many Thousands Gone, a major distinction between "societies with slaves" (e.g., African society) and "slave societies," like the United States, where color and slavery were coterminous. According to Berlin, In societies with slaves, no one presumed the master-slave relationship to be the social exemplar. In slave societies, by contrast, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations: husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student.

 From the most intimate connections between men and women to the most public ones between ruler and ruled, all relationships mimicked those of slavery...."Nothing escaped, nothing and no one." Whereas slaveholders were just one portion of a propertied elite in societies with slaves, they were the ruling class in slave societies; nearly everyone -- free and slave -- aspired to enter the slaveholding class.¹⁵

 The presumption that Blacks under Islam were a slave class in a slave society is a major premise of Black Orientalists and a primary means by which they impose a single interpretation upon every racially-tinged statement or action by an Arab or non-Black Muslim. If views such as Mâlik's regarding Blackness as an affliction are to serve as proof that Arab Muslims were all Jim Crow segregationists, however, what is to be made of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s statements about dark-skinned women, or Frederick Douglass's reference to the "ape-like appearance of some of the genuine Negroes," or Alexander Crummel's labeling of West Africans as "virile barbarians," or, for that matter, comedian Chris Rock's declaration, "I hate niggers!"?¹⁶  Clearly, Muslims south of the Sahara, who overwhelmingly adopted the Mâlikî school's interpretation of Islam, ignored the view attributed to Mâlik and required a male relative to validate a marriage. Why should the prejudicial view attributed to Mâlik and some Mâlikîs be accepted as the final, definitive word?

 We might also ask whether the statement of Ibn Khaldûn quoted above is necessarily an antecedent to such "scientific" racialist theories as those of Jensen, Shockley and the authors of The Bell Curve.¹⁷ In making such a determination, how justified would we be in ignoring Ibn Khaldûn's explicit statements to the effect that "race" is an imagined social construct, that the notion of Black intellectual inferiority is false, that the Old Testament story about Noah cursing his son Ham does not refer to Blackness but says only that Ham's sons shall be cursed with enslavement, and that it is climate, not blood, that affects endowments such as intelligence or civilization?¹⁸  According to Ibn Khaldûn's theory, the farther people are removed from the moderate climate of the Mediterranean, the less their intelligence and civilizing potential. Thus, he imputed the same savage-status to Africans farthest removed to the south and to White "Slavs" (Saqâlibah) who were farthest removed to the north.¹⁹ One must ask why the history of race relations in the United States should be the only prism through which his statements can be viewed.

 It is true that the examples cited, as well as many others, demonstrate that Arab and other non-Black Muslims were afflicted with race- and color-prejudice.²⁰ The insinuation, however, that such attitudes stemmed from the same psychology and implied the same all-encompassing social and political reality as that created by White Americans stems more from imagination than from fact. In the year 659/1260, some seven centuries before the United States' civil rights movement, a Black man appeared in Cairo after the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols and claimed to be a member of the 'Abbâsid House. The Mamlûk Sultan, himself a former slave, ordered the Chief Justice to make an official inquiry into the claim.After his genealogy was confirmed, the Black man took the name al-Mustansir and was inaugurated amîr al-mu'minîn (Commander of the Faithful); i.e., Caliph, temporal successor to the Prophet Muhammad.²¹ To date, however, no Western nation has been headed by a Black man.

  Clearly, facts such as these must be considered if the real significance of race and color prejudice in Arab/Muslim society is to be understood, but Black Orientalism deliberately ignores or suppresses them. This is done in order to invest race prejudice in the Muslim world with the same significance it has in the United States. The result is that cultural bias and the deliberate, race-based monopoly and abuse of power become so indistinguishable that a cultural idiosyncrasy such as Rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot?s contempt for the gaunt figures and flat buttocks idealized by Cosmopolitan magazine takes on the same significance as Jesse Helms's and the Republican party's opposition to affirmative action.²²

NATIONALIST BLACK ORIENTALISM: MOLEFI ASANTE

 There are at least three types of Black Orientalism: the Nationalist, the academic and the Religious. All three impugn the relationship between Blackamericans and historical Islam. Because of space limitations, only Nationalist Black Orientalism is discussed below.²³

 In 1980, Professor Molefi Kete Asante started a fire with the publication of his provocative work, Afrocentricity:The Theory of Social Change.²⁴  The book became the manifesto of the "new" Afrocentric movement.²⁵  It was followed in 1987 by The Afrocentric Idea and in 1990 by Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge.²⁶  The purpose of these works was to lay out the aims, ideological underpinnings and practical methodology for an approach to historical, cultural and sociological studies that viewed the world, especially the African world, from the perspective of Africa and Africans rather than from the dominant Eurocentric perspective that claimed to be objective and universal. Asante criticized other approaches, including those of Africans and African Americans, that he felt had been influenced by bias and by assumptions accepted uncritically by the European and American academy. Chief among these was the negative assessment of the achievements of Africa and its contributions to world civilization. Afrocentrism was a clarion call to Africans and African Americans to free themselves from these negative stereotypes and return to their true African selves. It was also an appeal to non-Africans to consider the African rather than the reigning European perspective as an effective tool for re-humanizing the world.

 As a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, a city heavily populated by Blackamerican Muslims, Asante was well aware that Afrocentrism faced stiff competition. To neutralize its competitors, he argued that they were inconsistent with the dictates of Afrocentricity, which reflected the true African self. He wrote of Islam,

 Adoption of Islam is as contradictory to the Diasporan Afrocentricity as Christianity has been. Christianity has been dealt with admirably by other writers, notably Karenga; but Islam within the African- American community ha [sic] yet to come under Afrocentric scrutiny. Understand that this oversight is due more to a sympathetic audience than it is to the perfection of Islam for African-Americans. While the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad was a transitional nationalist movement, the present emphasis of Islam in America is more cultural and religious.²⁷

 Asante's critique of Islam is neither theological nor philosophical. He does not attack the foundational beliefs of Islam, such as its monotheism or belief in an Afterlife, but rather what he considers the negative, self-deprecating place of Blacks in Islam. His appeal, in other words, is to certain sensibilities developed by Blackamericans as a result of their New World experience. His message is essentially that Islam inherently promotes an Arab supremacy that is no less pernicious and injurious to Blacks than the White supremacy of the West.

 Asante insists that the Arabs have structured Islam in such a way that non-Arabs (that is, Blackamericans) are forced to accept the inherent superiority of Arab idiosyncrasies and presuppositions. This leads to "the overpowering submissiveness of Africans and other non-Arabs."²⁸  The specific means of enforcing this submissiveness were: language (i.e., the primacy of Arabic among Muslims); Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca; the qiblah, or the direction in which Muslims must turn when offering ritual prayers; the doctrine that Muhammad was the last prophet; and customs such as dress that were informed by a specifically Arab culture. While space does not permit a full treatment of all these points, what follows should be sufficient to demonstrate that Asante is a proponent of Black Orientalism. In assessing the validity of this critique, it is important to remember that the determining factor is not whether his list is factually correct but whether the meaning attributed to it is grounded in objective analysis or ideology.

 The first issue has to do with language. In response to the thesis that Arabic spread among Muslim populations because of its "prestige and usefulness," Asante writes, "While this is partially true, it is more correct to say that the language succeeded because of force and punishment."²⁹  He offers no historical proof from European, African or Arabic sources. Rather, Asante relies on his readers' tendency to utilize their Western experience as the analogue for all historical reality. The Arabs, in other words, must have forced Arabic upon their vanquished populations, because the loss of African languages among the American slave population proves that white Americans forced their language upon their slaves.

 But if the ability to "force and punish" was the primary means by which language spread, Turkish would have wiped out Arabic in all the areas of the Middle East over which the Ottomans ruled for almost half a millennium. If prestige and usefulness were really marginal as incentives, what accounts for the existence in places as far removed from the Arabs as China, Russia or Surinam of Muslim populations who continue to learn the language and who pride themselves on their ability to do so?

 Moreover, even if one concedes that Arabic spread by "force and punishment," would the ultimate effect and meaning of this imposition be the same as Blacks' experience in the New World?

 Here we come to a critical failing that virtually compels Asante to projection. He equates Whiteness with Arabness and then goes on to assume that the two function identically. This approach assumes that Arab supremacy had the same effect on Blacks as White supremacy, essentially relegating Blacks to a negative category made inescapable by their skin color. In fact, however, the attempt of the Umayyads (the first Muslim dynasty) in the first/seventh century to perpetuate a system that reduced non-Arabs to second-class citizenship failed. After that, once a people was Arabized, it became equal in its Arabness to its conquerors, as was the case, e.g., with the Egyptians, Syrians, and North Africans. This was true whether the adoption occurred through force, choice or osmosis. Arabized peoples often eventually superceded the "original" Arabs in intellectual, artistic and other pursuits, including the acquisition of power, as occurred, e.g., with Abû Nawâs in Arab poetry, al-Ghazalî in Muslim theology, Abû Hanifa in Islamic law, and the famous Barmakid family of politicians.³⁰  By contrast, when the language, religion and culture of New World Africans were destroyed and replaced by English and Protestantism, they were rendered neither English nor American. The naturalization law passed by the United States Congress in 1790 defined American-ness as Whiteness, and Whiteness was a boundary that Black people could not cross.³¹ It is thus misleading to imply, as Asante does, that the experience of subject populations, even under a regime of Arab supremacy, was the same as the experience of New World Blacks under a regime of White supremacy. I have often been asked by Arabs who hear me speak Arabic if I am an Arab. I have never been asked by a White person who heard me speak English if I was White. If Arabization, forced or voluntary, expressed a commitment to the principle of E pluribus unum (from the many, one), American Whiteness emphatically excludes Blacks on the principle of E pluribus duo (from the many, two).³²

 The remainder of Asante's list implies submissiveness, but we might note that while White American Muslims change their names, perform the pilgrimage, offer the daily prayers, modify their customs and often replace their dress, because of their understanding of their duty as Muslims or a preference for traditions they deem to be identifiably Muslim, Asante does not speak of White American submissiveness to the culture and religion of the Arabs. The reason is that in his experience and that of Blackamericans generally, White people simply do not have culture and religion imposed upon them. Being forced into the role of passive recipient is an exclusively Black reality. It is the force of this projection of the Blackamerican experience that both leads Asante to his submissiveness thesis and sustains its currency among his Blackamerican readership.

 Asante's critique reflects a desire to delegitimize Islam in the Blackamerican community. His criticisms are based more on projections from the Blackamerican experience, however, than on an objective assessment of Islam itself. In describing "White" Orientalism, Edward Said noted that it was grounded in the fears, desires, repressions and prejudices of the West. Asante's Black Orientalism, like that of all Black Orientalists, attempts to cast Islam and the Muslim world in a mold that accommodates Blackamerican imaginings, resentments, prejudices and difficulties in confronting the intractable problem of American race relations.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BLACK ORIENTALISM FOR ISLAM IN THE UNITED STATES

 From the decades following the Civil War, Black America has maintained a cultural/political orthodoxy dedicated to policing the boundaries between Blacks and "pseudo-Blacks." Pseudo-Blacks have traditionally been identified as those whose cultural authenticity and/or political loyalty to the Blackamerican community are in doubt. This cultural/political orthodoxy has always been part of the mores and sentiments of the folk, and paying homage to it has been the sine qua non of success for any serious movement among Blackamericans -- even those, such as Elijah Muhammad's, that sought to alter the substance of Blackamerican culture.

 The early Blackamerican Islamizers' understanding and respect for this tradition facilitated the popularity and growth of their movements. Immigrant Islam, however, arrived in the United States oblivious to this reality, and passed on much of this myopia to Blackamerican Muslims who came under its influence. The result has been a cognitive dissonance in which fossilized doctrines and practices from the Muslim world are imagined to be viable substitutes for effectively engaging American, and particularly urban American, reality. At the same time, the power and status that Islam once enjoyed within the Blackamerican community has been displaced in many quarters by a sense of disappointment and betrayal and a feeling that Islam and Muslims are irrelevant if not detrimental to the Black cause.

 In this context, the rise of Black Orientalism must be viewed not only as a reflection of attempts by Blackamerican Christians and other non-Muslims to regain lost ground. The perspective of immigrant Islam must also be recognized as threatening the status and future of Islam in Black America. Blackamerican Muslims must confront and take concrete steps to overcome ideological dependency, for they will cease to exist at the mercy of the definitions of others only when they acquire the authority to define a properly constituted Islamic life for themselves.

 Black Orientalism, however, is not a problem for Blackamerican Muslims alone. Immigrant Muslims are equally affected by the phenomenon, especially in the context of the United States after September 11. In earlier times, the criticism Black leaders and thinkers leveled at Blackamerican Muslims never reached the point of threatening Islam's place in the collective psyche of Blackamericans. In the present atmosphere, however, given the diminished relationship between Islam and Black Religion, on the one hand, and the nationwide rise in anti-Muslim mania, on the other, this danger is far more imminent. Any permanent estrangement between Islam and Blackamericans would be nothing short of disastrous for Muslims of all backgrounds, for it is primarily through Blackamerican conversion that Islam enjoys whatever status it does as a bona fide American religion. To date, Blackamericans remain the only indigenous Americans whose conversion to Islam connotes neither cultural nor ethnic apostasy. Without Blackamerican Muslims, Islam would be orphaned in the United States, with virtually nothing to save it from being relegated to the status of an alien, hostile threat. This has obvious implications for anyone associated with Islam.

 The threat of Black Orientalism nonetheless lies far more in the refusal of Muslims, Blackamerican and immigrant, to recognize and address the causes that brought it into being than it does in the efforts of Black Orientalists themselves. Muslims must confront, honestly and energetically, the question of whether the shift in the basis of Islamic religious authority had to result in the kinds of dislocations that led to the rise of Black Orientalism. This question is critically important for Blackamerican

 Sunnis, because they cannot return to classical Black Religion in a manner that privileges it over the historical Sunni tradition. The question for them is whether they can master and supplement that tradition to speak to their realities as Blacks, as Americans and as Muslims.

 As for immigrant Muslims, it may be time to recognize that their greatest interest as Muslim Americans lies not in the situations in Palestine or Kashmir but in establishing a sense of their belongingness, however problematic, in the collective psyche of Americans as a whole. This may mean devoting more energy to attaching themselves to an already-existing tradition of Islamic belongingness in the United States. In such a context, Black Orientalism will reveal itself to be as great a threat to them as it is to Blackamerican Muslims. It is a threat, however, that will only be defeated through practical and attitudinal changes, not the same old rhetorical smoke and mirrors.

 

NOTES

¹ Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978).

² Op. cit., p. 11.

³ I use the term "Blackamerican" as an alternative to both the "African" and the hyphenation in African-American. My contention is that Blacks in the United States, certainly religiously speaking, are no longer African. Politically, the hyphen in African-American does not have anything like the efficiency that it does in the case of Jewish-Americans or Italian-Americans, the latter's Jewishness and Italianness being essentially protected by their Americanness.

⁴ Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (State University of New York Press, 2002).

⁵ C. Eric Lincoln, Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma (Hill and Wang, 1999), p. 31.

⁶ Joseph R.Washington, Jr., Black Religion:The Negro and Christianity in the United States (University Press of America, 1984), p. 37.

⁷ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1965). Translated from the French by Constance Farrington.

⁸ Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization (Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co., 1971); Shawna Maglangbayan, Garvey, Lumumba, and Malcolm: Black National- Separatists (Third World Press, 1972); Yosef Ben-Jochannan, African Origins of Major Western Religions (Alkebu-lan Books, 1970); Haki Madhubuti, Enemies:The Clash of Races (Third World Press, 1978). On these and other works, see the informative article by Y. Nurridin, "African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity Between Traditional Islam, African Heritage, and the American Way," in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John Esposito, Muslims on the Americanization Path? (Scholars Press, 1993), pp. 282 -287.

⁹ Ibn Khaldûn, 'Abd al-Rahmân b. Khaldûn, al-Muqaddimah (Dâr wa Maktabat al-Hilâl, 1986), p. 45. Throughout this essay, dates are given according to both the Muslim and the Christian calendars.

¹⁰ See Muhammad al-Amîn al-Shanqîtî, Adwâ' al-bayân fî îdâh al-qur'ân bi alqur'ân (Dâr al-Kutub al-'Ilmîyah, 1421/2000, 10 vols.), 1:330. Al-Shanqîtî refutes the position of Tâ?ûs by referring to several marriages conducted by the Prophet between a Black and a White, e.g., Zayd b. Hâritha (White) with Barakah, the mother of Usâmah (Black); Usâmah b. Zayd (Black) with Fâtima bt. Qays (White, from the "royal" tribe of Quraysh); and Bilâl (Black) with the sister of 'Abd al-Rahmân b. 'Awf (White).

¹¹ Malik ibn Anas (c. 713 ? c. 795), a legal expert in the city of Medina, founded a school of Islamic jurisprudence.

¹² Adwâ', 1:330. Al-Shanqîtî, himself a Mâlikî, refutes this view and cites several poems in praise of the beauty of Black women.

¹³ Al-Dardîr, Al-Sharh al-Kabîr (Dâr al-Fikr, N.d., 4 vols.), 4:309 (on the margin of Muhammad al-Dasûqî, Hâshîyat al-dasûqî 'alâ al-sharh al-kabîr).

¹⁴ This is obviously not the place for a full treatment of slavery in Muslim history, though the subject certainly deserves a full study, especially given the tendency on the part of Blackamericans to assume that American slavery is the norm that all other systems of slavery followed. They thereby make no distinction between slavery in a capitalist society and slavery in a non-capitalist order, slavery that is race-based and slavery that is race-neutral, slavery that draws slaves under the full orbit of law and slavery that denies slaves any legal rights at all. This makes objective discussions of Muslim or African or Polynesian slavery virtually impossible. It also obscures the fact that it was not slavery but White supremacy that was, and remains, the cause of Black subjugation in the United States.

¹⁵ Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 8.

¹⁶ See M.E. Dyson, I May Not Get There With You:The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Free Press, 2000), pp. 193 - 194; Douglass quoted in W.J. Moses, Afrotopia:The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 80; Crummel quoted in Moses, op. cit., p. 69. Chris Rock, comedian, used the line, "I love black people ... but I hate niggers" in one of his comic routines.

¹⁷ Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press, 1994).

¹⁸ Ibn Khaldûn', al-Muqaddimah, pp. 89, 63, 61. Ibn Khaldûn states that al-Mas?ûdî took the fallacious notion of Black intellectual inferiority from the Arab philosopher al-Kindî, as cited by Galen.

¹⁹ al-Muqaddimah, op. cit., p. 60. But see the entire discussion, p. 44ff, for a full exposé of the theory of climate. This is confirmed by St. Clair Drake in his Black Folks Here and There:An Essay in History and Anthropology (University of California, 1987, 2 vols.), 2: 157 ? 59. Drake relies on the French translation of Ibn Khaldûn. In my view, Drake was not a Black Orientalist. Indeed, the fact that he relies exclusively on Orientalist writings but is still able to avoid Black Orientalism shows the extent to which this phenomenon is far more conscious than unconscious. Black Orientalists, in other words, tend to find only what they are looking for.

²⁰ See, for example, St. Clair Drake, op. cit., 2: 77 - 184.

²¹ See Shâfi' b. ?Alî, Husn al-manâqib al-sirrîyah al-muntaza'ah min al-sîrah alzâhirîyah ('A. Khowaytar, ed., 2nd ed., 1410/1989), p. 79. There are numerous other instances of Black rulers in the central Arab Islamic lands.

²² See Sir Mix-A-Lot's hit single, "Baby Got Back," on the album Mack Daddy (Universal, 1992).

²³ All three forms of Black Orientalism are discussed in my forthcoming book, Islam and the Blackamerican:The Third Resurrection.

²⁴ Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity:The Theory of Social Change (Amulefi Pub. Co., 1980).

²⁵ As Wilson Jeremiah Moses points out, Afrocentric thought dates back at least to the nineteenth century and was even championed in the twentieth century by a number of White scholars, most notably Melville Herskovitz in Myth of the Negro Past (Beacon Press, 1958) and Martin Bernal in Black Athena:The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 1987). The term "Afrocentrism"was used by W.E.B. DuBois as early as 1962. See Moses, Afrotopia:The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1- 2, 1-12.

²⁶ Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Temple University Press, 1987); Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Africa World Press, 1990).

²⁷ Molefi Kete Asante,Afrocentricity (Africa World Press, 1996), p. 2. This was the eighth printing of the work that originally appeared in 1988.

²⁸ Afrocentricity, op. cit., p. 3.

²⁹ Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Africa World Press, 1998), p. 131. This is a reprint of the work first published in 1990.

³⁰ Though born of a Persian mother, Abû Nawâs (130/747 - c. 195/810) was and is considered to be among the greatest of all Arab poets. See The Encyclopedia of Islam (E. J. Brill, 1913), I: 102. Al-Ghazalî (450 - 505/1058 - 1111), also of Persian lineage, is thought by many to be the most famous Muslim after the Prophet

Muhammad himself. His most influential works were written in Arabic. The Encyclopedia of Islam, II: 146 - 49. Abû Hanifa, again of Persian ancestry, was the eponym of the Hanafi school of law, numerically the largest in all of classical Islam. He died in 150/ 767, and even today many if not most Muslims believe he was a pure Arab. The Encyclopedia of Islam, I: 90. The Barmakid family, originally a Buddhist priestly family from Balkh, rose to power as government ministers under the Abbasid Caliph. The Encyclopedia of Islam, I: 663 -66.

³¹ In the Act of March 26, 1790, Congress authorized naturalization for "free white persons" who had resided in the United States for at least two years and swore loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. The racial requirement remained on the federal books until 1952, though naturalization was opened to members of some Asian nationalities in the 1940s.

³² For more on this theme, see Matthew F. Jacobson?s important Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 109 - 35.