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Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
Sherman Jackson offers a trenchant examination of the career of Islam among the blacks of America. Jackson notes that no one has offered a convincing explanation of why Islam spread among Blackamericans (a coinage he explains and defends) but not among white Americans or Hispanics. The assumption has been that there is an African connection. In fact, Jackson shows, none of the distinctive features of African Islam appear in the proto-Islamic, black nationalist movements of the early 20th century. Instead, he argues, Islam owes its momentum to the distinctively American phenomenon of "Black Religion," a God-centered holy protest against anti-black racism.
Islam in Black America begins as part of a communal search for tools with which to combat racism and redefine American blackness. The 1965 repeal of the National Origins Quota System led to a massive influx of foreign Muslims, who soon greatly outnumbered the blacks whom they found here practicing an indigenous form of Islam. Immigrant Muslims would come to exercise a virtual monopoly over the definition of a properly constituted Islamic life in America. For these Muslims, the nemesis was not white supremacy, but "the West." In their eyes, the West was not a racial, but a religious and civilizational threat. American blacks soon learned that opposition to the West and opposition to white supremacy were not synonymous. Indeed, says Jackson, one cannot be anti-Western without also being on some level anti-Blackamerican. Like the Black Christians of an earlier era struggling to find their voice in the context of Western Christianity, Black Muslims now began to strive to find their black,
American voice in the context of the super-tradition of historical Islam. Jackson argues that Muslim tradition itself contains the resources to reconcile blackness, American-ness, and adherence to Islam. It is essential, he contends, to preserve within Islam the legitimate aspects of Black Religion, in order to avoid what Stephen Carter calls the domestication of religion, whereby religion is rendered incapable of resisting the state and the dominant culture. At the same time, Jackson says, it is essential for Blackamerican Muslims to reject an exclusive focus on the public square and the secular goal of subverting white supremacy (and Arab/immigrant supremacy) and to develop a tradition of personal piety and spirituality attuned to distinctive Blackamerican needs and idiosyncrasies.
Islam in Black America begins as part of a communal search for tools with which to combat racism and redefine American blackness. The 1965 repeal of the National Origins Quota System led to a massive influx of foreign Muslims, who soon greatly outnumbered the blacks whom they found here practicing an indigenous form of Islam. Immigrant Muslims would come to exercise a virtual monopoly over the definition of a properly constituted Islamic life in America. For these Muslims, the nemesis was not white supremacy, but "the West." In their eyes, the West was not a racial, but a religious and civilizational threat. American blacks soon learned that opposition to the West and opposition to white supremacy were not synonymous. Indeed, says Jackson, one cannot be anti-Western without also being on some level anti-Blackamerican. Like the Black Christians of an earlier era struggling to find their voice in the context of Western Christianity, Black Muslims now began to strive to find their black,
American voice in the context of the super-tradition of historical Islam. Jackson argues that Muslim tradition itself contains the resources to reconcile blackness, American-ness, and adherence to Islam. It is essential, he contends, to preserve within Islam the legitimate aspects of Black Religion, in order to avoid what Stephen Carter calls the domestication of religion, whereby religion is rendered incapable of resisting the state and the dominant culture. At the same time, Jackson says, it is essential for Blackamerican Muslims to reject an exclusive focus on the public square and the secular goal of subverting white supremacy (and Arab/immigrant supremacy) and to develop a tradition of personal piety and spirituality attuned to distinctive Blackamerican needs and idiosyncrasies.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
37 people are currently reading
924 people want to read
About the author
Sherman A. Jackson
12 books67 followersSherman A. Jackson (also known as Abdul Hakim Jackson) is an American scholar. He is the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He was formerly the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Visiting Professor of Law and Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. From 1987 to 1989, he served as Executive Director of the Center of Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. He is author of several books, including Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihâb al-Dîn al-Qarâfî (E.J. Brill, 1996), On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî's Faysal al-Tafriqa (Oxford, 2002), Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Towards the Third Resurrection (Oxford, 2005) and Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Oxford, 2009).
He has been featured on the Washington Post-Newsweek blog, "On Faith," as well as the Huffington Post. In 2009 he was named among the 500 most influential Muslims in the world by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Amman, Jordan, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He has also been recognized by Religion Newswriters Association ReligionLink as among the top ten experts on Islam in America.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. From 1987 to 1989, he served as Executive Director of the Center of Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. He is author of several books, including Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihâb al-Dîn al-Qarâfî (E.J. Brill, 1996), On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî's Faysal al-Tafriqa (Oxford, 2002), Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Towards the Third Resurrection (Oxford, 2005) and Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Oxford, 2009).
He has been featured on the Washington Post-Newsweek blog, "On Faith," as well as the Huffington Post. In 2009 he was named among the 500 most influential Muslims in the world by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Amman, Jordan, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He has also been recognized by Religion Newswriters Association ReligionLink as among the top ten experts on Islam in America.
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August 28, 2020
If one came to this book expecting a narrowly focused analysis about racial politics they’d be in for quite a surprise. This is an intellectual tour de force that defies easy categorization. Broadly speaking it’s about the struggle to live a good life in the modern world and the United States that looks specifically at the experience of African-Americans and their appropriation of Islam as a means of creating such a life for themselves. It would be difficult to summarize all of the book here, which is brilliant and erudite despite being a bit choppily edited at times, but I will outline some of its best insights.
Jackson defines religion structurally and identifies something among African-Americans that he calls Black Religion. Black Religion is part of a moral and psychological response to the condition of oppression and racial subjugation that African-Americans found themselves in after being brought by force to the New World. To this day it has a lasting and natural impact on their thoughts and desires. Any religious or political tradition that does not contain within itself an element of protest against injustice, or any system that quietly accepts and legitimates the status quo in the name of order, does not really speak to them. A people literally created by oppression fear cultural assimilation just as much as domination and will want to protect both their well-being and identity in the fact of a predatory majority. As such, the modes of religiosity and political organization that they identify with will tend towards an oppositional stance to power. Black Religion embodies a recognition of the reality of suffering and the need to overcome truly cosmic oppression. We can see this in some manifestations of the black church, as well as the soaring emancipatory rhetoric of secular black politicians connected to American civic religion.
But the African-American appropriation and adoption of Islam that was perhaps the most remarkable manifestation of Black Religion and is what Jackson deals with here. The religion began among African-Americans as a sort of proto-Islamic heresy that, while unorthodox, spoke directly to their most pressing challenge: how to survive with dignity under totalitarian racial oppression. Certain forms and terms from Islam were appropriated by men like Noble Drew Ali and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for the purposes of building and defending their community. Religions often spread first as heresies that speak to people's lived realities before later becoming orthodox. While people recoil from much of what the NOI believes, there is nothing necessarily strange that Islam started in America the way that it did. Indeed, if Islam did not speak directly the psychological and material needs of African-Americans they would never have gravitated towards it. The first African-American Muslims looked to Islam but also deftly appropriated what was good from the surrounding white bourgeois Protestant American culture: values of thrift, work and strait-laced communal cohesion. This is something you can still vividly see in the dress and comportment of Nation of Islam members, as well as many middle-class orthodox Sunni African-Americans.
Following the loosening of immigration laws in the 1960s, Muslim immigrants from around the world began to migrate to the United States. They brought with them their own understandings of Islam that were inevitably related to the cultural circumstances that they were raised in. But they also brought with them their own emotional and psychological views religion. These clashed somewhat with Black Religion, and make up what Sherman refers to as Post-Colonial Religion. Just like African-Americans could not really accept any version of religion that did not address their need for resistance and protest against white supremacy, immigrant Muslims were drawn mostly towards a version of Islam that satisfied their need to rebuild self-esteem and take some kind of revenge against the Western colonial powers that had subjugated them for the past several centuries. Since it came from abroad, the immigrant Post-Colonial Islam tended to portray itself as somehow more natural and universal. In reality it is just as historically constructed as the African-American Islam, by now mostly orthodox Sunni, that grew up in the United States.
I found this comparison to be quite useful and fit with my own emerging view Post-Colonial Religion has had its day and should be transcended. Dr. Jackson provides some grounds for doing that and finding a new modus vivendi between different communities here. But more importantly he speaks to African-Americans of how they can, and already have, appropriated the aspects of the Islamic tradition useful for their purposes in the United States. People need spirituality and some sort of organizing principle for themselves as a community: particularly when they are under some form of threat or deprivation and not sitting at the lofty peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Islam is useful to African-Americans for its spiritual and organizational benefits, which it has offered many other people in the past, but also because its a vehicle for helping reject the false universals of Western society that have often been pressed upon them. It's a full-fledged tradition, belonging entirely to them as they now have their own self-authenticating native authorities, and is a useful tool for creating the "social cement" that communities require to construct themselves.
Although much of the book focuses on the relationship between African-American Muslims, immigrants and American society more broadly, there is also a lot that is universally interesting both intellectually and spiritually in here. In the United States the mysterium tremendum of religious experience has been either lost amid the wider Death of God in the West or replaced with some sort of deracinated God-is-my-Friend type experience, Jackson argues. He clearly wants African-American Muslims to avoid this and resist the dominant whims of society by becoming their own independent people capable of partaking and rejecting in broader trends as is their interest. In addition to juridicial diversity in religion he calls for a mix of spiritualities. While he values and promotes the inner-directed version of popular Sufism, he also points out that this on its own is insufficient for his people who have suffered serious material crises in their history. To this end he makes a powerful case for immanent spirituality, a worldly-active one that focuses on rejecting the idol-God of white supremacy which has for many people of all backgrounds set itself up as one of the false Gods of our time. This effort would spiritually benefit not just African-American Muslims but non-white immigrants of all religious backgrounds, as well as whites whose own spiritual vision is clouded by setting up their identity as a sort of hollow idol.
The book also has an incredible chapter responding to the arguments of what Jackson calls “Black Orientalism," and its associated claims that Islam is unsuitable to the needs of Black Religion or is even hostile to black-skinned people. It concludes with a set of maxims extracted by Jackson from a 14th century Egyptian Sufi text that are truly moving. Alongside his deep knowledge of American and Middle Eastern history, he’s also deeply versed in the social dynamics and traditions of Egypt, among his many other talents. I can see why he’s considered one of the great scholars of the United States today. Despite some choppy editing it’s one of the most important books I’ve read on the subject of race and religion generally and is a genuine classic.
Jackson defines religion structurally and identifies something among African-Americans that he calls Black Religion. Black Religion is part of a moral and psychological response to the condition of oppression and racial subjugation that African-Americans found themselves in after being brought by force to the New World. To this day it has a lasting and natural impact on their thoughts and desires. Any religious or political tradition that does not contain within itself an element of protest against injustice, or any system that quietly accepts and legitimates the status quo in the name of order, does not really speak to them. A people literally created by oppression fear cultural assimilation just as much as domination and will want to protect both their well-being and identity in the fact of a predatory majority. As such, the modes of religiosity and political organization that they identify with will tend towards an oppositional stance to power. Black Religion embodies a recognition of the reality of suffering and the need to overcome truly cosmic oppression. We can see this in some manifestations of the black church, as well as the soaring emancipatory rhetoric of secular black politicians connected to American civic religion.
But the African-American appropriation and adoption of Islam that was perhaps the most remarkable manifestation of Black Religion and is what Jackson deals with here. The religion began among African-Americans as a sort of proto-Islamic heresy that, while unorthodox, spoke directly to their most pressing challenge: how to survive with dignity under totalitarian racial oppression. Certain forms and terms from Islam were appropriated by men like Noble Drew Ali and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for the purposes of building and defending their community. Religions often spread first as heresies that speak to people's lived realities before later becoming orthodox. While people recoil from much of what the NOI believes, there is nothing necessarily strange that Islam started in America the way that it did. Indeed, if Islam did not speak directly the psychological and material needs of African-Americans they would never have gravitated towards it. The first African-American Muslims looked to Islam but also deftly appropriated what was good from the surrounding white bourgeois Protestant American culture: values of thrift, work and strait-laced communal cohesion. This is something you can still vividly see in the dress and comportment of Nation of Islam members, as well as many middle-class orthodox Sunni African-Americans.
Following the loosening of immigration laws in the 1960s, Muslim immigrants from around the world began to migrate to the United States. They brought with them their own understandings of Islam that were inevitably related to the cultural circumstances that they were raised in. But they also brought with them their own emotional and psychological views religion. These clashed somewhat with Black Religion, and make up what Sherman refers to as Post-Colonial Religion. Just like African-Americans could not really accept any version of religion that did not address their need for resistance and protest against white supremacy, immigrant Muslims were drawn mostly towards a version of Islam that satisfied their need to rebuild self-esteem and take some kind of revenge against the Western colonial powers that had subjugated them for the past several centuries. Since it came from abroad, the immigrant Post-Colonial Islam tended to portray itself as somehow more natural and universal. In reality it is just as historically constructed as the African-American Islam, by now mostly orthodox Sunni, that grew up in the United States.
I found this comparison to be quite useful and fit with my own emerging view Post-Colonial Religion has had its day and should be transcended. Dr. Jackson provides some grounds for doing that and finding a new modus vivendi between different communities here. But more importantly he speaks to African-Americans of how they can, and already have, appropriated the aspects of the Islamic tradition useful for their purposes in the United States. People need spirituality and some sort of organizing principle for themselves as a community: particularly when they are under some form of threat or deprivation and not sitting at the lofty peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Islam is useful to African-Americans for its spiritual and organizational benefits, which it has offered many other people in the past, but also because its a vehicle for helping reject the false universals of Western society that have often been pressed upon them. It's a full-fledged tradition, belonging entirely to them as they now have their own self-authenticating native authorities, and is a useful tool for creating the "social cement" that communities require to construct themselves.
Although much of the book focuses on the relationship between African-American Muslims, immigrants and American society more broadly, there is also a lot that is universally interesting both intellectually and spiritually in here. In the United States the mysterium tremendum of religious experience has been either lost amid the wider Death of God in the West or replaced with some sort of deracinated God-is-my-Friend type experience, Jackson argues. He clearly wants African-American Muslims to avoid this and resist the dominant whims of society by becoming their own independent people capable of partaking and rejecting in broader trends as is their interest. In addition to juridicial diversity in religion he calls for a mix of spiritualities. While he values and promotes the inner-directed version of popular Sufism, he also points out that this on its own is insufficient for his people who have suffered serious material crises in their history. To this end he makes a powerful case for immanent spirituality, a worldly-active one that focuses on rejecting the idol-God of white supremacy which has for many people of all backgrounds set itself up as one of the false Gods of our time. This effort would spiritually benefit not just African-American Muslims but non-white immigrants of all religious backgrounds, as well as whites whose own spiritual vision is clouded by setting up their identity as a sort of hollow idol.
The book also has an incredible chapter responding to the arguments of what Jackson calls “Black Orientalism," and its associated claims that Islam is unsuitable to the needs of Black Religion or is even hostile to black-skinned people. It concludes with a set of maxims extracted by Jackson from a 14th century Egyptian Sufi text that are truly moving. Alongside his deep knowledge of American and Middle Eastern history, he’s also deeply versed in the social dynamics and traditions of Egypt, among his many other talents. I can see why he’s considered one of the great scholars of the United States today. Despite some choppy editing it’s one of the most important books I’ve read on the subject of race and religion generally and is a genuine classic.
August 28, 2020
Sherman Jackson's provocative and fascinating book offers a historical and critical engagement with Blackamerican Islam, to use his preferred term. As a reader who is neither black nor Muslim, I can say that I learned a great deal, and in many ways I found this to be an extremely valuable model for the study of the expression of religious ideas in new cultural idioms. In that sense, at least, it should be of deep interest to the comparativist.
He begins by tracing the rise of Islam among blacks in urban North America in the formative days of the Nation of Islam in the early 20th century. In that context, the exotic concept of Islam was essentially used by Blackamericans as a structure for clearing space to conceive and express unique religious needs and beliefs. Because there were nearly no actual Muslims in the US, Islam was a free zone for the imagination, where anything could be said without fear of contradiction. Many of the early views of Nation of Islam were concurrently bizarre, and, to my sensibility, archaic, such as the belief that white people were essentially created by an evil scientist.
This set the stage for an interesting confrontation years later, when millions of Muslim immigrants arrived, many of whom were shocked to learn how Islam was being interpreted by Black Muslims. Some of the new arrivals set about "rectifying" the views that had by now been in place for several decades. At this poin, the attention of Blackamericans began to shift to the study of Arabic, the traditional study and interpretation of the Qu'ran, and the indigenous laws and texts of the traditional heartland of Muslim belief. Today, the majority of Blackamerican Muslims are Sunni.
This process of assimilation and accommodation led to an interesting conflict, because, on the one hand, the Nation of Islam did indeed generate a number of religious ideas that were distinctly un-Islamic, at least as viewed from its traditional formulation. On the other hand, these novel religious structures were in many ways unique expressions of the spiritual needs of Blackamericans, and they belonged to a larger phenomenon that Jackson refers to as "Black Religion" in the United States, which he describes as a general religious paradigm that is opposed on all levels to white supremacy and its destructive effects.
The solution that Jackson advocates in this rather partisan book is that the fundamental tools and beliefs of traditional Islam should be "appropriated" to serve the spiritual and social needs and Blackamericans, without uncritically accepting all that it has to offer. For traditional Islam is often represented by its immigrant advocates as dialectically opposed to the culture of Europe and America, which may be conceived by conservative scholars such as Sayid Qutb as a form of "Jahiliyyah," a polemical term describing the state of depraved ignorance that characterized pagan Arabia in pre-Muslim times.
Blackamericans cannot accept this critique of their own culture for a number of reasons, not least of which because it entails a rejection of the unique cultural heritage and legacy that they have built at great cost, and to great reward, over the long centuries. Nor is traditional Islam necessarily well-suited to address the social and psychological need for emancipation from white supremacy - not because it is incompatible with this imperative (indeed, Jackson argues that a proper understanding of Islam demands confronting white supremacy), but because the problem of white supremacy has simply not been formative for Middle Eastern, Asian, and African forms of Islam in the same way.
Jackson persuasively rejects what he terms the "false universals" of immigrant Islam - the belief that contemporary forms of religious life that are affirmed, say, in Saudi Arabia, are correct, and should be viewed as valid and binding for all Muslims in all times and in all places.
I fully agree that the tendency to project one's own conclusions and sympathies as if they had no history is an extremely pernicious and destructive belief. Jackson takes contemporary Islam to task for its tendency to espouse a false universalism that is tied to a mythologized sense of history and self-serving political ideology, and argues at length that Islam has always expressed its fundamentals in terms of the specific circumstances of each historical time and place.
Although I agree with this argument, I do not think Jackson is particularly consistent on this point. One of my chief criticisms of this book is that his critique of universals is underdeveloped, and its application is selective and incoherent. For this book, as I mentioned, is a strongly partisan work, arguing for a particular vision of history and Islam, and where Jackson uses his critique of universals to assail the positions of others, his own conclusions are frequently presented as normative and binding, without any qualification.
One must be self-critical to at least the degree one is critical of other beliefs and views, and here I think Jackson is at his weakest. He has a tendency toward what I experience as a kind of covert authoritarianism.
In my opinion, Jackson is also a somewhat stronger social critic than philosopher or theologian, and a bit at sea when he engages in philosophical critique.
The final pages of the book are dedicated to his vision of Islam, founded on a conception of Allah as completely transcendent, in the sense that God is in no way defined by any external fact or relationship, but is entirely self-constitutive. Man, on the other hand, is a creature of contingency, and our religious duty is to discover and obey the law of God.
I don't find that strong dualistic stance persuasive or useful, and I don't think he really gets nondualism. His response to the self-abandonment taught by Sufism, practices that William Chittick strikingly rendered as "naughting the self," is to argue, in essence, that because the ego of Blackamericans have been so battered by social abuse, they need to strengthen the self, not weaken it. This argument rests on a deep misunderstanding of what self-abnegation means in most apophatic traditions, including Sufism. Surrender of the self doesn't mean you break the ladder before you climb, it means you let go of it at the top.
In the final pages of the book, on the one hand we're warned against the tendency by humans to impute their own provisional desires to the will of the creator, and to turn religion into a self-serving farce. Perhaps two pages later, he writes that Blackamerican Muslims must "not be afraid to ignore what they deem to be irrelevant or harmful and add what they deem to be useful or necessary." How one is to do this without succumbing to what he refers to as the "false heteronomy" of the "new anthropomorphism" is not obvious.
Finally, I found Jackson's gender politics off-putting. It is my belief that the function of social criticism, such as Jackson engages in here, is to serve the self-emancipation of communities by thought. Apparently in Jackson's conception, it is to serve the self-emancipation of men. Women occupy precisely zero of his attention, other than a baffling and somewhat off-puting statement in the introduction that amounts, as far as I can follow it, as a statement that treating the "gendered" aspect of Islam is tantamount to acceding to the "soft" and "feminized" destabilization of traditional gender binaries that have "weakened" Black Christianity.
This view gives me significant pause. If the form by which white supremacy is expressed is to render blacks as "other," "lesser," and "not fully human," the form by which male supremacy is expressed is to keep silent with respect to women, and to affirm the unspoken premise that when we're talking about history, we're talking about male history. With his obvious courage, intellect, and experience, Jackson should know better than to play into it.
Nevertheless, I learned a great deal of value from this book, and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in either Blackamerican history, or Muslim history, or both, with the aforementioned caveats kept in mind. In particular, his analysis of how old traditions find new expressions when expressed within new historical horizons is cogent and thought-provoking, and deserves careful consideration.
He begins by tracing the rise of Islam among blacks in urban North America in the formative days of the Nation of Islam in the early 20th century. In that context, the exotic concept of Islam was essentially used by Blackamericans as a structure for clearing space to conceive and express unique religious needs and beliefs. Because there were nearly no actual Muslims in the US, Islam was a free zone for the imagination, where anything could be said without fear of contradiction. Many of the early views of Nation of Islam were concurrently bizarre, and, to my sensibility, archaic, such as the belief that white people were essentially created by an evil scientist.
This set the stage for an interesting confrontation years later, when millions of Muslim immigrants arrived, many of whom were shocked to learn how Islam was being interpreted by Black Muslims. Some of the new arrivals set about "rectifying" the views that had by now been in place for several decades. At this poin, the attention of Blackamericans began to shift to the study of Arabic, the traditional study and interpretation of the Qu'ran, and the indigenous laws and texts of the traditional heartland of Muslim belief. Today, the majority of Blackamerican Muslims are Sunni.
This process of assimilation and accommodation led to an interesting conflict, because, on the one hand, the Nation of Islam did indeed generate a number of religious ideas that were distinctly un-Islamic, at least as viewed from its traditional formulation. On the other hand, these novel religious structures were in many ways unique expressions of the spiritual needs of Blackamericans, and they belonged to a larger phenomenon that Jackson refers to as "Black Religion" in the United States, which he describes as a general religious paradigm that is opposed on all levels to white supremacy and its destructive effects.
The solution that Jackson advocates in this rather partisan book is that the fundamental tools and beliefs of traditional Islam should be "appropriated" to serve the spiritual and social needs and Blackamericans, without uncritically accepting all that it has to offer. For traditional Islam is often represented by its immigrant advocates as dialectically opposed to the culture of Europe and America, which may be conceived by conservative scholars such as Sayid Qutb as a form of "Jahiliyyah," a polemical term describing the state of depraved ignorance that characterized pagan Arabia in pre-Muslim times.
Blackamericans cannot accept this critique of their own culture for a number of reasons, not least of which because it entails a rejection of the unique cultural heritage and legacy that they have built at great cost, and to great reward, over the long centuries. Nor is traditional Islam necessarily well-suited to address the social and psychological need for emancipation from white supremacy - not because it is incompatible with this imperative (indeed, Jackson argues that a proper understanding of Islam demands confronting white supremacy), but because the problem of white supremacy has simply not been formative for Middle Eastern, Asian, and African forms of Islam in the same way.
Jackson persuasively rejects what he terms the "false universals" of immigrant Islam - the belief that contemporary forms of religious life that are affirmed, say, in Saudi Arabia, are correct, and should be viewed as valid and binding for all Muslims in all times and in all places.
I fully agree that the tendency to project one's own conclusions and sympathies as if they had no history is an extremely pernicious and destructive belief. Jackson takes contemporary Islam to task for its tendency to espouse a false universalism that is tied to a mythologized sense of history and self-serving political ideology, and argues at length that Islam has always expressed its fundamentals in terms of the specific circumstances of each historical time and place.
Although I agree with this argument, I do not think Jackson is particularly consistent on this point. One of my chief criticisms of this book is that his critique of universals is underdeveloped, and its application is selective and incoherent. For this book, as I mentioned, is a strongly partisan work, arguing for a particular vision of history and Islam, and where Jackson uses his critique of universals to assail the positions of others, his own conclusions are frequently presented as normative and binding, without any qualification.
One must be self-critical to at least the degree one is critical of other beliefs and views, and here I think Jackson is at his weakest. He has a tendency toward what I experience as a kind of covert authoritarianism.
In my opinion, Jackson is also a somewhat stronger social critic than philosopher or theologian, and a bit at sea when he engages in philosophical critique.
The final pages of the book are dedicated to his vision of Islam, founded on a conception of Allah as completely transcendent, in the sense that God is in no way defined by any external fact or relationship, but is entirely self-constitutive. Man, on the other hand, is a creature of contingency, and our religious duty is to discover and obey the law of God.
I don't find that strong dualistic stance persuasive or useful, and I don't think he really gets nondualism. His response to the self-abandonment taught by Sufism, practices that William Chittick strikingly rendered as "naughting the self," is to argue, in essence, that because the ego of Blackamericans have been so battered by social abuse, they need to strengthen the self, not weaken it. This argument rests on a deep misunderstanding of what self-abnegation means in most apophatic traditions, including Sufism. Surrender of the self doesn't mean you break the ladder before you climb, it means you let go of it at the top.
In the final pages of the book, on the one hand we're warned against the tendency by humans to impute their own provisional desires to the will of the creator, and to turn religion into a self-serving farce. Perhaps two pages later, he writes that Blackamerican Muslims must "not be afraid to ignore what they deem to be irrelevant or harmful and add what they deem to be useful or necessary." How one is to do this without succumbing to what he refers to as the "false heteronomy" of the "new anthropomorphism" is not obvious.
Finally, I found Jackson's gender politics off-putting. It is my belief that the function of social criticism, such as Jackson engages in here, is to serve the self-emancipation of communities by thought. Apparently in Jackson's conception, it is to serve the self-emancipation of men. Women occupy precisely zero of his attention, other than a baffling and somewhat off-puting statement in the introduction that amounts, as far as I can follow it, as a statement that treating the "gendered" aspect of Islam is tantamount to acceding to the "soft" and "feminized" destabilization of traditional gender binaries that have "weakened" Black Christianity.
This view gives me significant pause. If the form by which white supremacy is expressed is to render blacks as "other," "lesser," and "not fully human," the form by which male supremacy is expressed is to keep silent with respect to women, and to affirm the unspoken premise that when we're talking about history, we're talking about male history. With his obvious courage, intellect, and experience, Jackson should know better than to play into it.
Nevertheless, I learned a great deal of value from this book, and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in either Blackamerican history, or Muslim history, or both, with the aforementioned caveats kept in mind. In particular, his analysis of how old traditions find new expressions when expressed within new historical horizons is cogent and thought-provoking, and deserves careful consideration.
April 9, 2009
This has to be hands down one of the best and most insightful books that I have read in the past ten years. It is a must-read for every Muslim living in the United States, as he has something to say to each member of our vast community. Though some will not agree with everything he has to say (including myself), he nonetheless needs to be heard. Just for his poignant critique of what he terms "Black Orientalism" alone, this book deserves to be on the shelf of every "Black Studies" section in every university library and Barnes and Nobles. After summarizing the history of Islam in the United States, he goes on to elaborate on a way forward for the future of Islam in America. Every aspect of this book is thought provoking and it actually caused me to take a radical departure from my previous views and roles regarding the early new age black religious movements of the past century. I also appreciated his decision to keep the discourse academic, instead of dumbed-down of mass consumption. If you are like me, you may need a dictionary from time to time, but I promise you will be better for it. This is a must read and a book that shall forever remain upon my shelf (once I replace my lent out copy).
December 20, 2007
I loved this book. Jackson is really brilliant---his writing style is very academic but the subject matter is really interesting so it's not too bad. He talks about Islam and the Blackamerican community---touching on topics like Black religion, spirituality, and relations with the immigrant community. He says that the proto-Islamic movements earlier in the century (such as Nation of Islam), "authenticated" Islam for the Blackamerican context in America---thus, playing a role for allowing for the gradual adoption of orthodox Sunni Islam. In this way, Islam was considered acceptable to Black religion, in ways that Christianity perhaps never was---esp. b/c Christianity was seen as "the white man's religion." He's a huge proponent of letting go of the "immigrant" mindset in the States--Blackamerican Muslims as well as other American Muslims need to make Islam relevant in America. This book touched upon so much---race, spirituality, history, etc, but it was definitely missing something I wish he would have also addressed---the issue of gender. Being Black and Muslim and female introduces a whole new set of issues that would have further improved his book.
April 2, 2007
How to appreciate and learn from the roles Blackamerican Muslims can and should play as an example for the immigrant community and their progeny in navigating a system predicated upon a dominant European-American discourse / mental colonization.
August 16, 2007
Focuses on how the 'new' Muslim integrates himself in current American culture. The focus is on African American, but highlights immigrant muslims and the concept for white flight.
February 17, 2017
There are a lot of interesting ideas throughout this book. The first 85 pages are solid, but the rest of the book has some pretty serious issues. The positives: I really appreciate how seriously Jackson considers the theological dimensions of the black Muslim American experience, which traditionally have been overlooked by the academy. On this topic his insights are brilliant and ground-breaking. The negatives: While some of his caustic remarks about immigrant Islam are well-deserved, he goes too far in generalizing a very diverse group of people. Far worse than this offense, Jackson's blatant homophobia and lack of attention to gender issues are unforgivable and mar what could have been a brilliant book.
April 1, 2009
A must read for anyone interested in Islam in America
June 24, 2012
Excellent book. Well researched and addresses important issues regarding African-American Muslims.
May 29, 2021
This is an important read for Muslims living in America because, as Dr. Jackson contends, "without Blackamerican Muslims, Islam would be orphaned in the United States, with no indigenous roots to complicate attempts to relegate it to the status of an alien, hostile intrusion." Along with offering an understanding of the history of Islam in America, the last chapter in particular invites all Muslims to reevaluate their relationship to their Islamic practice and question if God is truly at the center.
February 8, 2017
Liberal pluralism as a cultural ideal (diversity, inclusion, and non-judgmentalism obligatory) and as a set of political arrangements are different. Islam can affirm the latter, in circumstances where Muslims had surpassing political power (Ottoman's millet system). Traditional Islamic jurisprudence exhorts Muslims “to honor treaties and agreements brokered by non-Muslims,” if we're not just fixing on “dogmatic minutiae, activist rhetoric, and uncritical readings of Islamic law and history.”
Christians rightly enter into public life, seeking to leaven our laws with the wisdom of Scripture and church tradition, not asserting claims on the basis of church authority, but arguing for them in the give-and-take of civic discourse. Muslims should do the same.
Christians rightly enter into public life, seeking to leaven our laws with the wisdom of Scripture and church tradition, not asserting claims on the basis of church authority, but arguing for them in the give-and-take of civic discourse. Muslims should do the same.
September 23, 2012
This book needs to be read by all American Muslims. I heard this first from Ust. Usama Canon, which motivated me to purchase this book in the first place and now after reading it echo his words. The importance of analyzing the history of Muslims in America and the evolution of sociocultural issues is imperative if we want to understand the problems we as a community face. What many of us don't see is that Arab and Asian Muslims and their descendants are susceptible to variations of the same sociocultural issues that Blackamericans face. The former may manifest them differently but many of the inferiority issues, White supremacy complex, and the need to realign the compass between culture and religious ideal are definitely shared struggles. Unless we as a community are able to embrace our history and work together (see the Quranic use of the word lita'arafu towards the end of chapter 2) dynamically to seek a balanced existence or like Dr. Jackson says "to live both fully and righteously" with attention to the context we reside in then we will continue to feel like we are ineffectually juggling two identities unequally and only seek the solutions that don't fit our context. Dr. Jackson's recommendations and analyses are integral if we would like to address this and further earnest study of these dynamics need to be written and discussed.
July 24, 2016
This book is a gem; a piece of well-researched and erudite scholarship, and one of the best books I've read on Islam generally, but also race relations more specifically. He successfully brings Islamic theology, Islamic thought and history into discussions about race relations, specifically doctrines which posit white as right, and virtuous, and systemically breaks this down - describing it as a 'false universal' - explaining that no doctrine or idea can transcend human contingency. Whilst he speaks only about the Blackamerican context, his ideas I would say have a much wider relevance than he's willing to admit in the book. A must read in my opinion for anyone interested in what Islam can offer a modern world still struggling with racism. My favourite quote: "Ibn Taymiya was right: The absolute human exists only as a mental concept. But the masterful conflation of this absolute human with the perspectives of the dominant group is what has established and sustains the power of white supremacy".
November 29, 2012
Dr. Sherman A. Jackson is one of the foremost Muslim American scholars on Islamic thought, Islamic life and the Impact of Islamic dynamics in America. This book also contains accounts of events and developments within the Muslim American population that were well known during my early development as a Muslim convert and my involvement in Islamic work efforts.
Dr. Jackson also skillfully addresses the dynamics between the Muslim American converts, their brothers and sisters from the historical Muslim world and the issues that these two group continue to struggle with in and among themselves.
Dr. Jackson also skillfully addresses the dynamics between the Muslim American converts, their brothers and sisters from the historical Muslim world and the issues that these two group continue to struggle with in and among themselves.
January 7, 2015
Really dense and pretty repetitive, but also interesting and super well researched.
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April 17, 2017Read by ACRL Member of the Week Rebecca L. Hankins. Learn more about Rebecca on the ACRL Insider Blog.
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