Blacks Still Drawn to Islam Despite FBI Raids

Date: Monday, November 02, 2009, 5:26 am
By: Jesse Washington, AP National Writer

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Sheikh Anwar Muhaimin, executive director of the Quba Institute Mosque in Philadelphia, poses for a photograph. (AP)

By now, Sekou Jackson is used to the questions: Why does he need to leave a work meeting to pray? Don't black Muslims convert to Islam in jail? Why would you even want to be Muslim?

"It's kind of a double whammy to be African-American and Muslim," said Jackson, who studies the Navy at the National Academy of Science in Washington. "You're going to be judged."

Jackson's struggle may have gotten harder when the FBI on Wednesday raided a Detroit-area warehouse used by a Muslim group. The FBI said the group's leader preached hate against the government, trafficked in stolen goods and belonged to a radical group that wants to establish a Muslim state in America. The imam of the group's mosque, a black American named Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was killed in a shootout with agents.

Although the FBI was careful to say those arrested in Detroit were not mainstream Muslims, it has accused other black Muslims of similar crimes, most recently in May, when four men were charged with plotting to blow up New York synagogues and shoot down a military plane.

Yet the Muslim faith continues to convert many average African-Americans, who say they are attracted by Islam's emphasis on equality, discipline and family.

"The unique history African-Americans have faced, we're primed for accepting Islam," said Jackson, 31, who grew up in a secular home and converted to Islam when he was about 18.

"When someone comes to you with a message that everyone is equal, that the only difference is the deeds that they do, of course people who have been oppressed will embrace that message," Jackson said. "It's a message of fairness."

It was a message of black pride in the face of dehumanizing prejudice that launched Islam in America in the 1930s.

Created by a mysterious man named Wallace Fard, the "Lost-Found Nation of Islam" strayed far from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, but its mixture of self-reliance, black supremacy and white demonization resonated with many blacks. Some 30 years later, Malcolm X began the African-American movement toward traditional Islam when he left the Nation of Islam, went on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and proclaimed that all whites were not evil.

In 1975, the Nation split into two factions: a larger group that embraced orthodox Sunni practices, and another, led by Louis Farrakhan, that maintained the Nation's separatist ideology.

Today, it is difficult to determine the number of Muslims in America. A 2007 Pew survey estimated 2.35 million, of whom 35 percent were African-American. Lawrence Mamiya, a Vassar College professor of religion and Africana studies and an expert on American Islam, said Muslim organizations count about 6 million members, a third of them black.

Most African-American Muslims are orthodox Sunnis who worship in about 300 mosques across the country, Mamiya said. The second-largest group follows Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which has about 100 mosques in America, abroad and U.S. prisons, Mamiya said.

He said the third-largest group is the Ummah, founded by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the black activist formerly known as H. Rap Brown. The group has about 40 or 50 mosques. The organization targeted in the raid near Detroit was part of the Ummah, the FBI said.

"The vast majority of African-American Muslims are using the religion to strengthen their spirituality," said Mamiya, who has interviewed many black Muslim leaders and congregants. He said the number of black Muslims is growing, but not as fast as before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Few white Americans convert to Islam "because the tendency is to view Islam as foreign," he said. "For African-Americans, it's part of their African heritage. There's a long tradition (in Africa). ... It moves them .....


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Black Africans kills and geneocides their own people and who you think is selling this Africans into slavery and child slavery...None others than Black Africans themselves. And they do that on a regular basis as well. I guess we are suppose to look over Black/African part and blame Muslim (for which many Black African nations are anyways).

I guess that is the same skewed logic that blames guns and drugs for the plight on the inner cities and not the Black folks who kill, rape, mame their own for a buck or two. Which in itself is a geneocide committed by blacks against blacks.


by   
Broughtwaprice
November 3, 2009, 5:24 pm
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muslims sill participate in the african slave trade. in the sudan, muslims slaughter africans who are not muslim on a regular basis.


by   
Spercy
November 3, 2009, 12:48 pm
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Why pick on Islam, Christians and Catholics were involved and benefitted from slavery as well..If we were to follow your logic, we would all be atheists since all religions have blood of others on their hands, all have went against the principles of God for self-serving reasons. And the only fool is the one who doesn't know that.


by   
Broughtwaprice
November 2, 2009, 6:25 pm
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I don't like Whitey, maybe I should check it out.


by   
Jiggy5
November 2, 2009, 1:47 pm
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I find it funny how fellow black men are fooled into Islam

This black to Islam movement is nothing more than cutting off one's nose to spite the face. Islam preached the holding of slaves, and also pillaged the entire Eastern Coast of Africa in the taking of slaves.

All it is is a way to find an identity outside of anything to do with white folks, and it is nothing more than a JOKE. I see in the eyes of these Black-Muslim fools, theyre only drawn to it because they hate white folks, yet know nothing of the history of their religion.


by   
A_day_in_the_life
November 2, 2009, 10:08 am
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