美國穆斯林社群內部，黑人穆斯林與中東裔移民的穆斯林有緊張關係在。
When weary Muslims gathered in
Toronto in December for an annual retreat, marking the end of a tumultuous U.S.
election year, they probably didn’t expect the event
to turn into a referendum on racial tensions within the American Muslim
community. But it did.
One session was led by Hamza Yusuf, a well respected white scholar
who co-founded Zaytuna College, which claims to be America’s first Muslim
liberal-arts college. At the end, he was asked whether Muslims should work with
groups like Black Lives Matter. “The United States is probably, in terms of its
laws, one of the least racist societies in the world,” he replied. “We have
between 15,000 and 18,000 homicides per year. Fifty percent are black-on-black
crime, literally. … There are twice as many whites that have been shot by
police, but nobody ever shows those videos.”
He went on. “It’s the assumption
that the police are racist. It’s not always the case,” he said. “Any police now
that shoots a black is immediately considered a racist.”
The backlash on social media was swift
and immense. “For black Muslims, hearing this from somebody we’ve all come to
love and trust—it was a cold slap in the face,” said
Ubaydullah Evans, the executive director of the American Learning Institute for
Muslims, who is black.
He said he saw Yusuf’s comments as a
way of perpetuating myths about “black pathology” and blaming African Americans
for violence. Yusuf’s statements were indeed
somewhat misleading: While a greater number of white people have been shot by
the police compared to black people, that statistic doesn’t account for
population size. When that adjustment is made, historical data
shows that black people are more likely to be shot by police than
white people.
Even though slightly less than
one-third of American Muslims are black, according
to Pew Research Center, American Muslims are most often
represented in the media as Arab or South Asian immigrants. The distinction between the African-American Muslim experience
and that of their immigrant co-religionists has long been a source of racial
tension in the Muslim community, but since the election, things have gotten
both better and worse. While some Muslims seem to be paying more attention to
racism because of Donald Trump, others fear that any sign of internal division
is dangerous for Muslims in a time of increased hostility.
While the Toronto conference was
upsetting, Evans said, he doesn’t think it’s representative of the biggest
racial problems in the American Muslim community. White racism toward black
people is “not the kind of racism that circumscribes my life as an American
Muslim,” he told me. “It’s the social racism I experience
from people of Arab descent, of Southeast Asian descent. This is the racism no one is talking about.”
The wave of immigration that shaped
today’s American Muslim population began in the 1960s, after Congress lifted
previous race-based restrictions on immigration. In many ways, this surge was directly
connected to the work of black Muslims and others involved in the civil-rights
movement: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed far
greater numbers of people from Asia and Africa to emigrate to the U.S. As of
2014, an estimated 61 percent of Muslims were immigrants, according to Pew,
and another 17 percent were the children of immigrants. Many of the perceived
racial tensions among Muslims come from conflicts between these immigrant
communities and non-immigrants, who are often black. (黑人穆斯林與中東裔穆斯林的緊張關係)
Some Muslims say “we shouldn’t talk
about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by
Islamophobes.”
“Immigrant Muslims had a convenient
comfort zone,” said Omar Suleiman, an imam
based in Dallas with a large online following. As each new immigrant community
established its own mosques and community centers, portions of the Muslim
American population became segregated by ethnicity and income. For non-black Muslims who grew up in the suburbs, attended private
schools, and rarely encountered black Muslims in their mosques, it’s easy “to
internalize many of the poisonous notions about the black community that … diminish the pain of those communities,” he said.
“I think a lot of African American
Muslims see a hypocrisy sometimes with immigrant Muslims,” said Saba Maroof, a Muslim psychiatrist with a South Asian
background who lives in Michigan. “We say that Muslims are all equal in the
eyes of God, that racism doesn’t exist in Islam.” And yet, cases of overt
racism aren’t uncommon, like when South Asian or Arab immigrant
parents don’t want their kids to marry black Muslims. “That happened in my
family,” she said.
These stereotypes are sometimes
perpetuated by leaders like Yusuf. Toward the end of the Toronto conference, he
apologized for the ambiguity of his previous comments, but clarified that he
believes “the biggest crisis facing the African American community in the
United States is not racism. It is the breakdown of the black family.” The line
won huge applause in the presentation hall where Yusuf was speaking.
But online, there was yet more
backlash: Kameelah Rashad, a black Muslim chaplain at the University of
Pennsylvania, started tweeting out pictures under the hashtag
#blackMuslimfamily, for example, to protest Yusuf’s remarks. (Yusuf declined a
request for an interview.)
Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk
about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by
Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air
internal laundry,” Rashad said. But “if I have to contend with anti-Muslim
bigotry outside of the Muslim community, and within my own community, I’m
having to push back on anti-black racism, I’m kind of fighting a war on two fronts.”
Racial dynamics have long shaped
Muslims’ political identities. There’s a “tendency to regard issues that impact
black people—and by extension, black Muslims—as not thoroughly Islamic,” said
Evans. “If we’re talking about a social issue in Palestine or Chechnya or
Kashmir or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, those things can properly be engaged
as ‘Islamic issues.’ [If] we’re talk about economic injustice, or
gentrification, or ex-offender re-entry, or recidivism, those things aren’t
really regarded as ‘legitimately Islamic.’ It’s like, ‘Why would a Muslim of
conscience be talking about that stuff?’”
Media outlets typically go for
“people who are ethnic, but not too much.”
As Muslim leaders have taken up
visible roles in anti-Trump activism, these dynamics have intensified.
Progressive leaders have condemned the so-called Muslim ban—the executive order
that originally affected people from seven Muslim-majority countries—putting
the focus in the Muslim community on immigration. But when protesters swarmed airports in large American cities following
the order’s release, some black Muslims stayed home, said Margari Hill, the co-founder of the Muslim Anti-Racism
Collaborative, who is also a black Muslim. “They have this long-term struggle.
Not much has changed—it’s always been kind of terrible,” she said. And “when it comes to the spectacle of black death, we don’t necessarily
see a lot of Middle Eastern or South Asian Muslims showing up for Black Lives
Matter.”
In activist spaces, black Muslim
leaders are sometimes discounted as well. “We’re often questioned, undermined,
and asked to bring other experts as the voice of authority,” said Asha Noor,
the former leader of an anti-Islamophobia campaign called Take on Hate, who is
a Somali-American Muslim. “I’ve seen a lot of black Muslims retreat into our
own spaces because they are safe spaces for us.”
As American Muslims have dealt with
everything from arson
to assault
because of their religious identity over the past several months, leaders have
increasingly called for unity. But attempts to unify can also stifle diversity,
said Hill. Even though three of the seven countries originally included in
Trump’s immigration order are in Africa—Libya, Sudan, and Somalia—Hill said she
rarely sees people from those countries featured in the news. Instead, media
outlets typically go for “people who are ethnic, but not too much,” she said.
“You have to be a little attractive.”
There’s also debate within the
community on the right way for Muslims to show their patriotism. The red,
white, and blue hijabi was a visible symbol
in the Women’s March on Washington in January, but not all Muslims think that
image sends the right kind of message about the religion. “It feels like a
performance,” said Rashad. “As a black American, I am fully cognizant of the
fact that that kind of performance does not lead to equality.” While Muslim
immigrants have often viewed America as a meritocracy, she said, “For black Muslims,
our history is complicated. This hasn’t been a place of opportunity or
meritocracy.”
“Nobody wants to be known as a
racist.”
Despite these tensions, Trump’s
election has inadvertently prompted some new conversations about race among
Muslims. Maroof compared Muslims’ new interest in race to a recent skit on Saturday
Night Live: A room full of white people watching the 2016 election results
start to realize America has issues with racism, while their black friends just
nod along. After the election, Maroof started a book club to learn more about
political activism, and asked Rashad, who also works in mental health, for
recommendations. She suggested The New Jim Crow, a book about racism and
mass incarceration. “The awakening I see some non-black Muslims experiencing is
very similar to some of the awakening I’ve seen my white friends going
through,” Rashad said.
Maroof said she has been aware of
racial tensions among Muslims for a long time, but feels like it’s particularly
important to pay attention to these issues now. “Even after 9/11, it wasn’t
this bad. There was not this travel ban or things like that,” she said. But she
recognizes that for a lot of Muslims—herself included—starting conversations
about intra-Muslim racism will inevitably come with uncomfortable moments.
“Maybe people are sometimes afraid they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she
said. “Nobody wants to be known as a racist.”
Meanwhile, some black Muslims are
having a political awakening of their own on issues like immigration. “There
wasn’t as much outrage with the Obama administration,” said Hill. Obama used
less inflammatory rhetoric to talk about immigration, but his administration still removed a
record-number of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
“Things that were invisible to many of us who have privilege as
non-immigrants—now we see it,” she said.
The irony of Islamophobia is that
it may eventually produce the exact cultural effect Islamophobes fear: Muslim
Americans may find a newly consolidated sense of identity and unity because of
their religious affiliation. If some Muslims once hoped to
be fully assimilated into elite American culture—to live in nice neighborhoods,
attend fancy schools, and fully blend in with white America—that’s likely
impossible now, Evans said. “The first blow to that
aspiration was 9/11. Then ISIS happened. The prospect began to look even
farther off,” he said. “With the Trump election, I really think it was finished
off. It’s over now.”
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