Zakariya Wright
for Dar al Islam

 On November 23, 2005, several African American Muslims in Oakland entered an Arab-Muslim owned liquor store and, after the owner could provide no acceptable explanation for his activities, they began destroying bottles of liquor, wine and beer. The message was clear: Muslims should not be involved in selling alcohol, especially to largely Black communities victimized by economic and political isolation.

 The mainstream media and even the legal system have relegated this conflict to a long-standing ethnic divide between Arab and African American communities. Some of the Muslim assailants have even been charged with hate crimes, positioning their actions in the American mind within a longstanding American tradition of White on Black racial intimidation, arson and lynching. The fact both sides of this particular incident were Muslim (not to mention both minorities) challenges the American public at large, and Muslims in particular, to take a closer look at the stakes and history involved in the issue of alcohol in Islam.

 In a recent interview, the President of the Yemeni-American Grocers Association, Mohamed Saleh Mohamed, explained the supposed impasse faced by many Arab liquor store owners. "We're caught in a Catch-22. I'm not saying what we do is right, but it's within the system. The government is not going to take it away, because they need the money and taxes ... America is full of opportunity, but most of the store owners come from Yemen and they are not educated, so this is the best they can do."1

 Arab liquor store owners dominate the business in many of America's cities. In Chicago for example, there are said to be more than 3,000 Arab/Muslim owned liquor stores.2 The vast majority of these are in poor and underprivileged Black neighborhoods, leading Imam Zaid Shakir to summarize decades of African American discontent, "Why don't you find these stores in the White or affluent neighborhoods ... What has happened here, when you have a liquor store on every corner, that is an institutionalized presence.3 Shakir has organized initiatives to put pressure on the Oakland City Hall to enforce zoning ordinances inconsistently applied between poor and affluent communities.

 But it would be overly reductionist to parrot the incredulity of many American Muslims, whose rejection of alcohol consumption against the backdrop of mainstream American culture sometimes seems as distinguishing as one of Islam's five pillars. Muslim societies have had a historically more complex relationship with the sale and consumption of alcohol. A common accusation against Muslim rulers perceived as corrupt throughout Muslim history has invariably been alcohol consumption. Today, Muslim governments have found it necessary to react to enforce alcohol prohibitions.4 Militants in Iraq have been accused of attacking and intimidating fellow Iraqi Muslims who have begun selling alcohol under American occupation.5 Even in America, the percentage of Muslims drinking alcohol may be surprising to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. A study of American Muslims found that nearly a third had drunk alcohol in the last six months.6

 There seems little dispute among Muslims that alcohol is indeed prohibited, and the following saying of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) seems widely enough repeated:

 Truly, Allah has cursed khamr (alcoholic beverages) and has cursed the one who produces it, the one for whom it is produced, the one who drinks it, the one who serves it, the one who carries it, the one for whom it is carried, the one who sells it, the one who earns from the sale of it, the one who buys it, and the one for whom it is bought.7

 Imam Zaid Shakir thus presents the conflict between African American Muslims and Arab liquor-store owners as a disconnect over religious sincerity rather than an ethnic divide. "We must have an ethical standard that is uncompromising," he said in a recent radio interview, "Right is right and wrong is wrong." He compares the idea that Arab immigrants were forced into selling alcohol to make a living by lack of economic opportunities to terrorists killing women and children because of political oppression. "When we get into the 'but', we lose our moral consciousness."8

 On January 27, 2006, a group of bay area Muslims marched on local Muslim-owned liquor stores to give the issue publicity and present a positive model for action beyond what Imam Zaid Shakir has called the "vigilante" behavior of the November, 2005, vandalism. Several local imams and community leaders attended the rally,9 demonstrating a remarkable resonance with a tradition of social-conscious behavior of Islamic scholars (ulama).

 If vice in Muslim societies has a longer history than the November incident in Oakland, so too have Muslim scholars been for centuries engaged in a struggle to make religious ideals a societal reality. A particularly interesting historical parallel emerges from the context of slavery and jihad in eighteenth and nineteenth century West Africa. The trans-Atlantic slave trade destabilized West African society from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries not only through the extraction of huge numbers of Africans and the internal wars generated by the demand for slaves, but by the injection of large quantities of guns and alcohol European traders exchanged for slaves. Muslims and non-Muslims alike were negatively affected by the alcohol trade, and some Jolof kings (who had otherwise been Muslim since the fourteenth century) were accused to joining the non-Muslim practice of selling their own subjects to meet an insatiable appetite for alcohol.

 The occasion of the slave trade was the impetus for the unification and emergence of isolated scholarly communities in an attempt to establish Islam and protect Muslims from the degenerative experience of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jihads were conducted by Nasr al-Din (d. 1674), Malik Dauda Sy (1690s), Karamoko Alfa (1720s), Suleyman Bal and Abdul-Qadir (1770s), Uthman Ibn Fudi (d. 1815) and al-Hajj Umar Futi Tal (d. 1864), throughout West Africa from Mauritania to Nigeria, often with the express purpose of stopping the outflow of Muslim slaves to the Americas and the inflow of alcohol.10 It is worthy of note that all of these individuals were scholars first and foremost, who (Uthman Ibn Fudi and al-Hajj Umar in particular) composed some of the greatest works of Islamic scholarship of their day anywhere in the Islamic world. In other words, the pernicious connection between alcohol, corruption and social oppression has been identified and acted upon by Islamic scholars, particularly in a West African context. It should perhaps not be surprising that African American Muslims, whose ancestors were victims of a slave trade where alcohol played no small role, have been the first to speak out against the phenomenon of the Arab-owned liquor store.

 The abuse of alcohol by either sale or consumption is nothing new in Muslim societies. But the recent march led by Bay Area Muslim leaders and scholars, such as Imam Zaid Shakir, indicates the fundamental role Muslim scholars have played and must play in Muslim societies. Scholars have historically been at the forefront of mounting protest campaigns against social injustice, campaigns which have been able affect rulers, popular sentiment and individual transgressors alike. The November incident of vandalism (also later linked to an arson attack and a kidnapping), which by all accounts reflects a lawless, irrational and violent form of Islam to the American public, is the alternative if scholars should not fulfill their role of social action.

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1. Cecily Burt, interview with Mohamed Saleh Mohamed, The Muslim News, December 12, 2005.

2. This reported by Imam Zaid Shakir.

3. Anas Cannon, "Interview with Imam Zaid Shakir," on Remarkably Current Radio, Channel 91.3 FM. For more information about the history of African American protest against the preponderance of liquor stores in Black underprivileged communities, see Adisa Banjoko, "Hip Hop predicted liquor store trashings long ago," on New American Media, December 2, 2005 (http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=de07d8311523400686599b218482867d).

4. Thus Malaysia has recently banned advertisements promoting alcohol (http://www.islamonline.net/english/news/2002-12/30/article09.shtml), while Kuwait made the news for shutting down twenty-five home breweries (http://www.islamonline.net/iol-english/dowalia/news-20-3-2000/topnews9.asp).

5. Roy McCarthy, "Iraq Violence as Puritans Ban Alcohol," in The Observer, 8/1/2004 (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,1273782,00.html).

6. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Adair Lummis, Islamic Values in the United States: a comparative study (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), p. 117-119. Haddad's sample group comprised 341 individuals, two-thirds of whom were immigrants. But the study found that the most likely Muslims to drink were young, American-born males.

7. Hadith found in al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.

8. Anas Cannon, "Interview with Imam Zaid Shakir," on Remarkably Current Radio, Channel 91.3.

9. For more information, see http://www.sfbayview.com/020106/realmuslims020106.shtml.

10. For more information on the context of the West African Jihad movements, see David Robinson, "Revolutions in the Western Sudan," in Levtzion and Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2000), p.131-152.