The last part of this ummah will not be rectified except by that which has rectified the first ummah. Malik Ibn Anas Ideology is a western concept hardly translatable into Arabic or Persian. Once Islam itself is interpreted, not as an all embracing religion or al-din, but as an ideology that serves a particular movement or regime as its ideological prop in the modern sense, then the failure of that movement or regime reflects upon Islam itself. In that case, either people loose their faith or begin to scrutinize the actual nature of the forces that have presented themselves as Islamic. Seyyid Hossein Nasr.

“I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere…but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated it will remain.

Alexis De Tocqueville

Democracy in America (1835-40) Before the West considered itself a civilization, or the world recognized the threats from the European expansionist enterprise, occurrences identifying the powerful in tribes and local societies forced leadership to assume its position. During the formation of early communities, groups took advantage of their diverse skill sets to form alliances with divergent tribes because of dissimilar competencies. Liaisons of this nature satisfied the needs of daily life, and encouraged the shaping of early civilizations. Leadership with its negotiating talents and vision of creative optimism, recognized group inadequacies and frailties as being the causes of restricted access to natural resources for one community, and the opportunity it presented to another. Communal survival dictated that people bargaining from weaker positions rely upon the empathy of leadership to accentuate the risks of partnerships, and ensure the benefits of an alliance with those from the outside posing dangers, or with access to essential resources for survival. From these interactions privileges were born, and from creating market access leadership grew to unquestioned power, which envisioned the purpose and created the language of the state. Privileges became the birth right of powerful classes, or the goal of individuals rising through the social hierarchy. However ascension to the exclusive social ranks that addend rights to its tribal or religious members has been a challenge since early times.    It was the character of the state mission and how executive power was sustained which determined its stability and longevity. How state actions were received and interpreted depended upon the sagaciousness of the elite’s message, and in what manner the nature of the mission was translated to their polar opposite, the subordinated. Instituting and sustaining the role of power was the goal of the politically astute religious authorities, and military dictators managing to define and seize that moment, and in many cases evolved that power into dynasties. European philosopher Edmund Burke once wrote, “I know of nothing sublime that is not some modification of power”. Burke was profound as he including in his scope of defining power the subjective, invisible, and the mystified as bearers of influence. In the defining years of early civilizations the central role of leadership helped to moderate group fears, which possessed limited access to resources for human survival. Through relationships that involved protecting vulnerable people from outsiders and lessening the field of competition for the goods needed for human life, frail and marginalized peoples traded their freedom of movement for the security of settlement and autonomy. To take advantage of the opportunity to accommodate and exploit mass anxieties, ruling powers rose to secured positions by coercion or physical domination, which was more likely to ensure longevity. The ability to control tribes was made certain by the safety afforded from the powerful status quo bequeathed to the powerless suffering in what Thomas Hobbes called the state of “continued fear and the danger of violent death” and a way of life that is, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.Because polities experienced untenable problems of cooperation, leadership guaranteed the means and alternatives for communal survival.  Gradually leadership classified opposing groups based upon sets of identifying factors, such as the geographic location of tribes, language, the natural resources available to them, the fashion by which deities were worshipped, or unique and distinguishing physical characteristics. These features became the racial and cultural lines drawn in the sands. Pluralism began the history of mankind, and with it brought about the psychology of difference: race, class, and culture.Civilizations have mastered the tools to build power bases by strategically constructing significant meaning behind the group differences in cultural traits and racial features. Communicating an understanding and belief about the world and its differences through symbols, codes and systems, exposed group distinctions whether the objects of belief are real or imagined. Empires have created and politically shaped illusions about the universe and people, which allowed controlling structures to remain in power and exploit opportunities for the accumulation of political capital and economic dexterity. From the texts of world mythologies linked to ancient empires, we are provided a peculiar philological value and insight into the depths of cultural and political persuasion, the racial dimensions of human engagement, the ammunition of philosophy, and the interpretation of religion as a weapon of control. Race as symbolic myth has served as an ideological weapon determining and defending sanctioned religious positions and imperialistic strategies. Pejorative racial definitions within a heterogeneous society have protected the position of the racially and economically privileged, and actualized resulting social morals conducive to securing that social position. Heterogeneous capitalist societies have primarily, but not exclusively flourished with the retention of class ranking through false characterizations and scientifically inspired notions that race is biologically deterministic and exclusive; that social behavior, intelligence and cultural expressions are derivatives of race; both ideas have become fundamentally essential to the foundations of Western racial segregation and class hierarchy. The contentions of racial classification have been masterfully employed by many nations to justify the importation of black people for labor and class prestige. As early Western civilizations grew and were inspired by the flourishing economic impulse, industries were built and driven on the dependence and inadequacy of captured African people. Economics and race however were not always business associates. The racial concepts that inferiorized black people slowly augmented the industrial empire, soon to grow from the uncompensated labor of imported Africans. Economics and culture greatly influenced all international slave enterprises, and deeply encouraged the Mediterranean and Atlantic slave trade until Protestant religious interpretations of the Bible justified the permanent enslavement of primarily but not exclusively the lost and wandering children of Africa. Pseudo- scientific racial theories and historical myths used to justify racial classification were reduced to cultural narratives and eventually made sacred by academic canons. The logic for racial subordination and the categorization of Oriental humanity was also found in the will of God expressing his approval for servitude by creating the anatomical suitability, and mental temperament of subordinated people needed by the master race. To ideologically demarcate those that used enslavement as a business from those that were designated to increase the profitability of the master race, were not only the biblical declarations justifying racial theories but the acute social observations of a society in need of laborers. The conclusions were that because dark people exclusively practiced their own forms of social, religious and cultural peculiarities distinct from the European aesthetical practices, targeting race as an indication of inferiority proved invaluable economically, and made ethical sense. Ethnic biases in essence stated that people and what they believed, how they looked, spoke, and behaved constituted a reason for fear; inevitably the group targeted for exploitation proved an ideal source.  Biased views, and politically interpreted scriptures were rewritten to exclude the status of pre and post- colonial American indentured whites, however with the same stroke racial concepts reduced the permanently enslaved African to the category of those born to be a slave. Elliott P. Skinner in his essay, The Dialectic: Diasporas and Homelands offers this comment, “The white Christian enslavers of the Africans developed biological, cultural, and biblical theories rationalizing their deed. Asserting the biological and cultural superiority of white over black and invoking and misinterpreting the biblical story of the son’s of Noah, white Christians insisted that the Africans- the sons of Ham- were ordained to be servants to the whites, the sons of Japhet”. African slaves were defined as a threat to all areas of civilized society except that of menial labor. Distorted ideas of race and ethnicity exaggerated and maximized the gulf of future human compatibility. Race in America became the most extreme form of delineating, and ultimately segregating one group from another. While race even more than religion was used to display the disparate aspects of American society, fear created the violence for which its victims had little recourse. By the late fifteenth century the West was beginning to engineer an impenetrably arrogant attitude to accommodate the import and more importantly the permanent ownership of slaves. Eventually stereotyping and coding of people based upon their rituals, beliefs, and idiosyncrasies resulted in race classification becoming civil law; and the spiritual justification for wholesale class servitude, economic and physical exploitation came from the authority of the Christian Church.  Homi K. Bhabha, from The Location of Culture explains the importance of civil authority, “The civil state is the ultimate expression of the innate ethical and rational bent of the human mind; the social instinct is the progressive destiny of human nature, the necessary transition from Nature to Culture. The direct access from individual interest to social authority is objectified in the representative structure of a General Will- Law or Culture-where Psyche and Society mirror each other, transparently translating their difference, without loss to a historical totality”.

With the growth and production potential associated with enslavement on this side of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, slaves became international human currency of prime importance to the upward mobility of class and the stability of empire. Collective ideological reflections are apparent in the civil nature of societal exchange, and codes of conduct considered law emanate from this ideological position.

The enterprise of slavery flourished long before the idea of racism; nonetheless original ideologies noting racial difference strengthened the resolve of racial superiority.  Slavery has been a part of the galvanizing forces of economies, one of the black eyes of many cultures, and in America its legacy a clandestine part of popular modern culture. Racism in the eighteenth century, now supported by the growing secular scientific community, and having garnered the sanctity of Protestantism became the rationalization for slavery and the moral code of the land. Economic incentives shaped the slave enterprise, the dogma of racial and cultural superiority later enforced it, and in the process the American version of the European will to dominant prospered over a newly formed agricultural society.

Tribes in West Africa familiar with raising cotton, tobacco, trained in metallurgy or animal husbandry demanded the attention of sea-faring slave capturers hired by financiers and slave traders soon to become influential captains of industry. There is no coincidence most Africans were able to acclimate themselves in America to the agricultural challenges of producing and harvesting crops with which they were familiar in Africa. Since the inception of the slave economy, race has become integral criteria for servitude as well as instrumental in restricting and preventing access to privilege, and the distribution of wealth procured from tilling the agricultural dream of white America, of which its inheritors continue to enjoy. Bigotry, an essential aspect of the western belief system manufactured myths that demonized one group while representations formed by the dominant class ensured social attitudes, if not legal segregation would sustain their class role. Domination was maintained by trepidation, enforced by bigotry and accepted by all which afforded the privileged the power to institutionally exclude dissimilar races. Canonized racial views became the arbitrator to the distancing of the two Americas, the resulting isolation emanating from the invisible machine of racial exclusion haunting the consciousness of the majority community, and within this totally American formula marginalized the disenfranchised. To be effective racist power required either the amenable moral position of society, the aggressive armed means, or the financial resources translatable into exclusionary power. Racist declarations, social positions, and the Biblical implications of superiority formed a powerful campaign of segregation and discrimination that has made America a unique opportunity for the spread of European thought and religion.Race issues have generally become benign topics about minorities, and the contemporary term of race seemingly always implies a connection to black Americans. However difficult it may be for Americans to grasp, the truth about the despicable marriage with black people is ultimately the history America will need to reread. Its destiny is linked to the American moral comportment facing and admitting previous racial crimes.  In the past Americans have managed to fashion a politics of avoidance when confronting social issues sensitive to race, class, and arrogantly pontifical about foreign religions and exotic cultures.  The politics of avoidance has clearly allowed for the circumvention of critical discussions, and placates interventions that offer solutions when justice and equality pertaining to minorities is needed.America has always considered race a theme problematic of black people prefabricating their condition; it appears America’s dominant ethnicity is insulated from or beyond “race talk”, excluded from accounting for past immoral economic gains, and summarily dismissed from past social atrocities. The discourse of race is an academic composite of a banal exercise about the uncontrollable frustrations and emotions of destitute minorities. America becomes defensive in its denial about the reasons for oppressed and stricken groups in America; it will not attest to, or confess its connection to the seminal beginnings of social impediments like slavery and the ideology of racism. The focus of race discourse in America has only been intended to temper the behavior, monitor the movements and control the environments of African Americans, and now Hispanics. Within this paradigm America adamantly points to the stereotypical behavior of minorities. America seizes every opportune moment to privately disparage those of other races because of collective self- inflicted and retentive destructive patterns of social behavior; actions that confuse middle and upper class Americans.In his introduction to The Color of Politics, Michael Goldfield mentions the place of the race discourse in America, “For all these views, race and racial discrimination are secondary issues in American political history. At most they are merely regional problems of the South, historically the most backward and supposedly the least important section of the country”. The racial tone of the relationship between the majority and minority communities established over one hundred years ago was intended to be a permanent partnership with historical roots. However with America now entertaining the emerging immigrant community, African American Muslims are relying upon balanced input from the morality of a growing Muslim sensitivity towards oppression, voiced from the consternation of an alienated minority Islamic community.Allowing expressions of culture or broad brushed accusations about race to become the sole indicators of group worth and potential is the foundation of racial bigotry, and the eventual separation of people based upon mythology. The centrality of race as a weapon of ideology hinges upon the existence and thus success of social and cultural hegemony. To ensure continued class domination racial myths are reborn and re-scripted for modernity; they are re-directed and secured to guarantee the effectiveness and stability of racial superiority. Judging this society on the exactness of its class divisions, with which America seems comfortable, is indicative of a society structurally and morally flawed, however dependant upon the existence of inequality.

Two decades ago Steinberg made a clear distinction between racism and ethnocentrism in North America.  Since the unprecedented migratory wave to America around the turn of the last century, European immigrants became objects of discrimination for a time. To distinguish between the treatments received by Europeans and other ethnicities, Steinberg demonstrated how European immigrant minorities of the late nineteenth century were disparaged for their peculiar cultural expressions in clothing, food, music, and language. However what was suggested to European immigrants was contrary to the message sent to racial minorities. Embedded in the voice of a developing industrial nation was the message that cultural dissimilarities between Americans and Europeans are transmissible and forgivable. What was conveyed to those of other cultural and religious persuasions was ethnic and behavioral differences are not transmissible, and will emphatically and forever keep Americans and others apart. Race was primarily the distinguishing factor for Steinberg. The distinctive indication of behavior was race, the perception of the object’s cognitive mechanism equated to his status and signaled his future potential in America.

Compared to other heterogeneous societies, the disparity in treatment afforded to people of color in America was not only significant to the early development of this political economy, but also seminal to the growth of its nationalistic and imperialistic identity. The historical image of America is a country that exercised initiative to bring about national independence, and re-introduced the modern world to democracy; its capitalism continues to reward acumen for individual accomplishment within a meritocracy. America is recognized as the leading liberal component for world peace and freedom, and has for generations created international attention through unprecedented material worth. However, American contributions to world culture reflect its treatment of minorities, and the levels to which its power reached to realize its prominence.

Although speaking about the seminal awakenings of racial isolation on a regional basis in the United States, Levine’s regional assessment suggests an American pattern, “Racism provided the glue that kept white Southern society from falling apart. Through the Civil War and even beyond, wealthy southern land- owners were able to convince poor whites that the division between white and black meant more than that between rich and poor. Thus white supremacy and racial slavery were developed, not primarily for cultural or psychological purposes, because of previously existing racial prejudice, but because they advanced the most powerful economic interests…” The moral architecture of an ideal and model Islamic society is designed with the higher objectives of Islamic law overseeing the undertaking. The life of the Prophet Mohammad provides copious examples by which Muslims construct individual and collectives relations. Muslims have a glimpse into the foundations of compassionate race relations by reading of the fondness the Prophet Mohammad showed for, and the proximity of Bilal and Zaid Ibn Thabit, both of African ancestry. This model shows how “extended family” was diverse and multi-racial; with this union the more mature and older Ethiopian Bilal would have brought the spiritual sensibilities and cultural introspection of African peoples. In essence the first ummah would not have known what the west classifies as racism; nonetheless unfamiliar with world cultures the region similarly would not have recognized cultural superiority. Racial and cultural diversity were not items of concern for a homogeneous society. Eliminating the inequality of class, the manumission of the enslaved and the waste of idolatry were the exercises rectifying the first Islamic community in Medina, and will be the vision by which the last ummah will be rectified. W.E.B. Dubois, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, and a social critic of great renown predicted in the early nineteen hundreds that “The greatest problem for America in the twentieth century will be that of the color line. The history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history”.  Dubois’ analysis resonates concerns plaguing the American Muslim ummah today. The color line, becoming distinct and pronounced, runs between cultures as well as through classes. Although the idea of race cannot be overridden, the color line has no place in Islam. This essay is not addressing the inclusive position of Islam, as that has been made emphatically clear by illustrations in the life of Prophet Mohammad. The personal convictions, identities of Muslims of color, and general Muslim attitudes about racial and cultural affiliations are the concerns of this essay. Pejorative perceptions of people of the African Diaspora manufactured in America and operating as ideology are not excluded from or diminished in the world of the Muslim. The position of many Muslims of color is one of uneasy optimism about immigrants migrating from the divisive colonial worlds unable to monitor the residual affects of European colonial thought, class, paternalism, and protest the tragedy of the West clashing with race. Nevertheless conspicuously absent from the national Muslim discourse is the level and significance to which immigrants coming from culturally and racially homogeneous nations with little experience incorporating and managing racial integration will confront and bring informed meaning to the conversation about the most heinous crime in American history, racism and the color line. For Muslims, America’s extended history of failure in race relations has produced an opportunity. It has set the stage for the Muslim community to produce solutions that broach this social sarcoma. Muslims have the prospect to intervene in American cultural and political life with a framework of understanding the degenerating atmosphere surrounding American’s future, and introduce an Islamic model for spiritual and social stability.African Americans and Africans comprise the nether status in the American and international Islamic communities, where these two groups are viewed as Islamically challenged, devoid of a culture historically affected by the spread of Islam, misinformed, illiterate of and distanced from the language and meaning of the Quran; products of either African American Christianity or African tribal animism. These attitudes are not unique and their implications did not originate in the Muslim community.  Since invasions by European Oriental intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, racial views have increased in currency. They have become pervasive, and painful to the degree that addressing the racial concern, curiously nonetheless, requires justification. J. Spencer Trimingham is clearly historically trained, and his writing influenced by the Orientalist tradition. In The Influence of Islam Upon Africa he refers to the virility of indigenous African religious expressions and discusses how adamantly Africans withstood the onslaught of an at times intolerant Islam. In pre-colonial Africa Islamic institutions were established. Trimingham suggests the cadence and depth of religious conversion was glacial and superficial, establishing a dualistic structure remaining within African societies. The book traces the pre-colonial spread and development of Islam in Africa, and with the same broad extraction echoes sentiments from the ancient Arab world about African Muslims. He notes that exposure to Islam was abrupt and acceptance gradual because of the endurance of native traditions and beliefs. Trimingham believes that progress was synergistic and conducted at the expense of traditional Islam.

“In practical life theology is not an important factor. The important thing was the performance of the rites and the adoption of such customs that differentiate the believer from others, for this means that the beliefs are accepted even though they are totally unknown. Theology, therefore, is not taught because it is an unnecessary abstraction. Intellectual heresy, and curiosity too, is virtually unknown. In the Islam of Africa as in African religion, whilst religion and practice are fixed, the content and meaning of the ritual remains vague…Therefore although little theology is actually taught, a certain amount of doctrinal lore is absorbed in so far as it is fused in everyday thought and language. Many spheres of Islamic culture had little or no influence upon Negro Africa—the penetration of Sufism in the tariqas and saint cult was retarded or incomplete, while Arab literary culture, theology, and philosophy, sciences and arts such as architecture, painting and calligraphy and the practical arts, were either completely absent or very marginal”.

 The corner of the world by which African Americans and African Muslims are viewed and judged by other Muslim ethnicities is mainly uninformed, not progressive or influenced by the Islamic historical continuum dating from the ninth century in North and West Africa.  Unfortunately the European versions of the Islamic continuum were not of significance to the colonial historian, and thus were considered of minor import by western academia. Because of the continuum some historians have recently considered the mass conversion to Islam by African Americans as a re-conversion. Their reasoning is that African American Muslims preserved the Islamic continuum through spirit and belief regardless of the passage of time, space or the subsiding of the religion. The continuum includes the history of religious and personal survival juxtaposed against Christian intolerance and codified barriers that discouraged and outlawed any religiously transplanted “foreign practice”. Certainly the nucleus of any displaced religion is vividly affected, but in spite of this dislodging, post- modern African American Muslims reconnected to a dormant spiritual specter on the Eastern side of the Atlantic. Collective memory and some recently discovered manuscripts by Omar Ibn Said a slave in Fayetteville, North Carolina commissioned to write his autobiography after whites discovered his literary abilities after being jailed for escaping slavery in Wilmington, North Carolina; and the story of Abdur Rahman Ibn Sori, both provide us with the understanding that the slave trade not only transported and unloaded African Muslims but also traces and retentions of Islamic history with them onto the shores of the southeastern United States where the legacy barely survived under the racist suppression of ecclesiastical insensitivity. Many slaves came to America as literate teachers from West Africa. They spoke several languages, lived within a defined and pronounced African cultural structure. As former scholars in Africa many were surrounded by academia, not an aversion for knowledge as the west would purport. In the mid eighteen hundreds Edward Blyden, the accomplished Pan-African scholar and historian known as the father of African cultural nationalism, wrote in his tour de force, Islam, Christianity and The Negro Race, of the unique character of the Muslim contrasted against experiences with his Christian brethren. As a Christian educated in the United States and Great Britain, Blyden wrote extensively and was passionate about cultural and religious life in West Africa. Having been a professor on the university level in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Blyden not only taught descendents of African American slaves, he was dramatically affected by Muslim life, its semblance of cohesion and respect for tradition. Describing communal village atmospheres as productive and peaceful, his work was visibly inspired by observing religious schools, the presence of trade with neighboring polities of dissimilar persuasions, and a government using what Blyden summarized as “Mohammedan traditions”. The obvious assimilation of the rites and rituals of daily Islamic life overwhelmed his writing to the extent that he never witnessed this “religious sophistication among any tribe or religion in West Africa”. Muslims are described in his writings as having character, and reflecting an ethical position and moral fiber in African society “not found in the African interpretation of Christianity”.On American slave plantations a small percentage of captured African Muslim slaves utilized religious education procured in Africa to cryptically document their inner beliefs, and religious thoughts. By covertly preserving belief in Islam as religion, the mere process of documentation for the slave served as a symbol of resistance to slavery. Sultana Afroz, a West Indian historian, in her work Islam & Slavery Through The Ages: Slave Sultans & Slave Mujahids provides insight into Muslim resistance to slavery: “The presence of Muslim families in Georgia, Maryland and Missisippi who are descedents of African Muslim slaves underscores the remarkable determination of the African mu’minun (Muslim believers) to preserve a distinctive lifestyle built on Islamic faith and culture. Many Muslim slaves, as soon as they set their feet onto the Americas, fought unceasingly for their freedom. Jihad / resistance in various forms became common features on the plantation of the new world. A common resistance to the slave system was the hijra / flight from servitude to establish their own ummah / communities based upon consensual leadership (shura) and Islamic tradition and culture in inhospitable and inaccessible areas throughout the Americas”.

The human will to survive and manage destiny, and the African experience of life indelibly carved itself into the souls of Americanized African folk; this imprint lived in the devote relationship Muslims have with, and the gratitude derived from, the omnipresence of the Creator.

Ellen Barry notes in owning Omar, “on Sapelo Island, in Georgia, a devout Muslim slave by the name of Bilal, who had been purchased in the West Indies, gave Muslim names to his nineteen children and was buried with a Quran and prayer rug. Omar Ibn Said left 13 manuscripts that still exist, including the newly rediscovered Life of Omar Ibn Said”. In Servants of Allah: Muslims Enslaved in The Americas, Sylviane A. Diouf says, “The example of Omar Ibn Said of North Carolina is revealing. He was first presented as a practicing Muslim who ‘deemed a copy of the Quran his richest treasure’…his autobiography written in 1831, opens with these words: “in the name of God, the most merciful, the gracious,-God grant his blessings upon Mohammad”.Diouf and others have commented on the writings of Abdur Rahman, a slave for forty years in Natchez, Mississippi, she says he “was appreciated by his masters and was well liked by the white population of Natchez…(and) he remained faithful to Islam”.Others have attested to the literary continuum initiated by West Africans and preserved by African Americans in the African Diaspora. Researchers are unearthing documentation relating to how teachers, imams, and even amirs encountered slave capturers and fell prey to the European’s brutal snare. A small percentage of traumatized slaves brought to the new world were in fact literate in Arabic; a small percentage were captured and enslaved while en-route to other village schools or mosques. To make sense of this incomparable historical entrapment, the role of patriarchy explains why African men traveled through unprotected crossroads to teach religion, counsel others, hold open discussions, help with agricultural production or increase the family’s opportunities for survival. The geographic challenges of forests, rivers and hills as a backdrop afforded foreigners the opportunity to subdue travelers and fulfill the slave contracts for stolen human labor. Sultana Afroz writes about the status of entrapped Africans: “A large proportion of the deported Muslims came from the intellectual elite who were educated in Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence and who could write with such beauty and exactness the Arabic alphabet and passages from the Holy Quran. They studied at centers of learning such as Jenne, Timbuktu, Kano and Bouna. West Indian histiography authenticates the literate and well-disciplined background of the Muslim slaves. The biographical notes of the slaves, many of them coming from mulay (princely) or noble families such as the Sherufa clan in Western Sudan which claims descent from Prophet Mohammad (saw)”. In the early sixteenth century, The European Christian Church relied upon moral appeasement to justify and allow the legalization of the capture, confinement and exploitation of African people as a labor pool. Because of the amiable character of the native and no political or religious proclivity for universalizing his religious or cultural beliefs, the village native was successful at establishing peace with bordering states in most parts of Western Africa; when coupled with his specific agricultural proclivities, the Western / Atlantic regions of the African continent were made attractive to slave capturers. It was definitively access to vulnerable and peaceful people, not necessarily Muslims that attracted slave capturers. Conservative estimates suggest that Muslim slaves turned out to be as high as eleven percent of those captured and sailed during the Atlantic slave crossing, or middle passage.The Church realized the solution needed for moral appeasement involved classifying people of color as subhuman with the ultimate purpose of black people serving the master race. By using race as a weapon of ideology, the racial myth was born and placed into active service. African slaves were classified for permanent slave status, complete exclusion from the portrait of humanity and the fruits of nationhood.   By working side by side with African slaves and indentured whites in North America, Native American Indians were initially tested for slavery. However American Natives proved incapable of slave conditions based upon their lack of resistance to European disease, and their acute knowledge of the local terrain as a means of escaping confinement proved their unwillingness. White servitude lasted for many years in the colonies. Treatment afforded to indentured class of European outcasts attested to the proficiency of racial myths now growing. It also demonstrated the relationship between slavery, the increase of difference with race, and the forthcoming economic explosion.Cedric J. Robinson from Race and Class, “ ‘White servitude’ soon necessitated by the destruction of native peoples, had been visited with degradations similar to those which later were associated with African labor. European workers were procured in Britain and the continent through prisons, illegal kidnappings, and the impressment of prisoners of religious and political wars… upon their arrival they were introduced to the whip, near- chattle conditions of labor, and a racial contempt for their class”. Conventional wisdom placed every African into the sub-human category; as animals, not entitled to nor capable of appreciating the treatment appropriated to humanity, slavery flourished as an essential component of American identity and culture. Western ideological hegemony, of which its violence, alienation, discrimination and segregation are umbilical cords, engineered a unique distortion and displacement of Western history, which succeeded in underplaying and writing out African accommodation of and compassion for the growth of sophisticated governments, and civilizations as witnessed by Timbuktu, Mali. This academic campaign of distorted historical representations misrepresents and misperceives the tribulations of former Muslim slaves and their alacrity for the freedom expressed in Islam. Whether interrupted by the trans-Atlantic slave era, or the domination and subjection of colonial rule in Africa, African Americans and Africans have demonstrated the formidable accomplishment of maintaining the status of soldiers of faith and believers in the universal principals of Islam and freedom.  Sylvia Diouf confirms rebellion and defiance to slavery as synonymous with the rejection of Christianity as an equally oppressive system, and to the African a foreign religion. “On the African’s part, it is worth noting that, as was, and still is, -the case in Africa, the peoples that followed traditional religions were more willing than the Muslims to convert. This does not mean that they renounced their previous faith; rather, they incorporated whatever seemed useful in the new religion into their original beliefs… for that reason they did not exhibit the defiance of the Muslim, whose creed could not accommodate Christianity… Many had been deported to America because they had been fighting for or defending Islam in Africa. Warriors of the faith were certainly not ready to reject a religion for which they had risked their lives for freedom. Because of their origins and the circumstances in which they were captured, the Muslims were particularly unfit potential recruits for priests who were trying to make America a Christian land”.

 The struggle for freedom in America, primarily envisioned and led by suppressed peoples of color, in too few cases meant the courage and space to practice Islam; that struggle which claimed the lives of many innocents as well as people that committed their lives, is directly connected to the material opulence and opportunity for livelihood Muslim immigrants enjoy today. Postmodern struggles for human and civil rights created an atmosphere and interjected the legal legislation whereby Muslim immigrants benefit from a desegregated society, higher education, entrée to the job market, access to public institutions and the ability to marry outside of ethnicities. These rewards are made possible because African Americans beginning with the plantation south began a human rights struggle, endured the emotional and personal suffering while pursuing the freedom known in the historical moment nonetheless preserved by collective instinctual memory. 

Dinesh D’Souza pays tribute to the struggle for freedom in The End of Racism, “In the United States I am no stranger to xenophobia, prejudice and discrimination. I also feel a particular debt to the civil rights movement, whose campaign on behalf of black equality helped to expand rights and opportunities for all citizens”. Esteemed scholar and one of the preeminent intellectual voices in America, Cornel West outlined the saga of the struggle for freedom in America however contributes another dimension to D’Souza’s comment. “Two hundred and forty four years of slavery and nearly one hundred years of institutionalized terrorism in the form of segregation, lynching, and second class citizenship in America were aimed at precisely this devaluation of Black people. This white supremacists venture was, in the end, a relative failure- thanks to the courage and creativity of millions of Black people and hundreds of exceptional white folk…”What should bond Muslims in the national Islamic community are the commonalities of struggle firmly rooted in the historicity connecting human rights and freedom, here and in the independence movements of Muslims internationally. In place of the existing religious gulf between Muslims, and the Abrahamic community, what are most effective would be affinity, compassion and empathy between the faith communities, the Muslim world and peoples of color, in an attempt to create an international workers class, and to enhance human unity through collective and self-identity. The objective of identifying a source of communication is to augment the fundamental principals of human democracy, and incorporate the salient wisdom of Islamic communalism, to become the framework for new cultural interactions and spiritual redirections. Years prior to World War One colonial invaders made joint and coordinated decisions to target for study and conquest the Near and Middle East Orient generally, and the Islamic world specifically. Their decisions included utilizing influential Islamic cultural resources as political ammunition to explore and subjugate the racial Orient. Eventually the colonial powers, through political navigation and military determination parried for a debilitated Muslim shell, and entered the region with the same fervor the forces of Anglophonia and Francophonia invaded and colonized Africa. As a result, one time dynamic and vibrant Islamic regions of the Middle East and Africa looked to the world for help after its impending implosion coalesced to European irruptions. The attempt to identify a source of communication was not found in a common belief, language, or value system. Problematic is the disconcerting lack of Islamic coalescence and proactive interest in the disconnection of Muslim communities based and dependant upon divisive cultural loyalties and political identities formed in the motherland. The divisiveness in the cultural impulse is indicative of the direction likely to be traversed by the national American Muslim community over the next few decades. Politics in the homelands of the emerging immigrant community has absorbed the attention and consumed the activities for the immigrant Muslim, and is requiring more of an emotional commitment to the mercurial tenor of his third world country. The political situation in the homeland is unfortunately recast in the America mosque. However distinctions in the mosque are not cast and divisions never drawn based upon educational backgrounds, vocations, income, American political affiliations, philanthropy, altruism, local neighborhoods, schools children attend, the capacity to love, appreciate art, music, or the human and physical sciences. Within the mosque the capacity to retain ancient tribal antagonisms and historical skirmishes predominates progressive spiritual tendencies and overrides the prominent wisdom in the art of religious tolerance.When America queries the Muslim world about its contribution to the moral reconstruction of the west, the reply must be designed around addressing the race and cultural dilemma, the dismantling of racial myths, and the demystification of the exotic; and by revealing the moderate attitude of the African and African American concerning the place and role of gender in Islam. The continued political divisions initiated in large part by the cultural impulse of third world nations, is not a prime example of the Muslim contribution to the complexities of the west. Modern Muslims have yet to design the social model America needs in its campaign to address the moral implosion.Based upon the notion that the political situation in the motherland of the immigrant is synonymous with Islam, the immigrant Muslim has rearranged and reprioritized his Islamic agendas while living in America. This natural demonstration of loyalty for the motherland comes attached to the baggage of the immigrant searching for the promised dreams the ceaseless wealth of America can afford.  Nevertheless race as a source of xenophobia, and cultural incohesion as a product of historicity, have fostered debilitating and paralyzing anxieties for too long tolerated as a consequence of the traditions in the motherland. The issues of acculturation into America, the disunity in the diverse American mosque, and entertaining segregation as the solution to cultural incompatibility have been ignored and eventually dismissed because of the insensibilities needed to compose the language of compromise.Crucial discourse about the locus of culture and race in the national Muslim community can no longer be disregarded. What prevents crucial discourse about race, class and culture is the fear by the cultural Muslim of digressing from the political agenda of the motherland. Intervention of local leadership is minimal because Muslims have unrealistically designated the Imam as the intercessor of all concerns, even those outside of the Quran. Immigrant leadership has proven itself on the most part ineffective, myopic and unfamiliar with the concept of liberation theology engrained in the collective religious instincts of African Americans; he is generally uninformed, disinterested and neutralized by in- house committee. The incapacity to locate synergy within the diverse cultural fabric, utilize the Islamic common ground of compassion and human empathy for the social predicament, and the failure to galvanize a collective aspiration for discourse is indicative of the intellectual stagnation increasing the desperation in the national community, and its meandering lackluster spiritual comportment.

 In the initial stages of building national coalitions, defining issues according to their Islamic import or whether they are simply entertaining the tradition of imported cultures is pertinent to the tone and language of the national agenda, its outlook, and the role and mission of succeeding public discussions.  The argument behind the racially victimized and culturally alienated African American, lies in marginalization and imbalance, political impotence, cultural castration, mythological deployment and individual alienation symbolizing the traditional American relationship with the dominant majority. This relationship can be summarized by the history of failed assimilation on the part of minorities; the discriminatory tendencies in American society becoming a sobering but unnerving comparison to the increasingly culturally divisive patterns within the American mosque.

Nevertheless as we enter the new century, the new surgically implanted face of America will be influenced by the connection it has to racial, cultural and religious inclusions. The Muslim intellectual has a formidable task of re-wording and re-interpreting for the American liberal the essential social vision and rudiments of Islamic inclusiveness. If the national Muslim intelligentsia presents a concise model of the Islamic philosophy of social inclusion, Americans will not be able to deny the weight and girth of the sacrosanct in Islamic heterogeneity, and the presence it commands in the monotheistic faith communities.

The abyss between Middle Eastern, Eastern European, African and indigenous Muslim groups in America is symptomatic of segregation, an inability to grasp the higher objectives of Islamic law, an ill-fated romanticism and satisfaction with cultural isolation. Typically what accompanies new surroundings for immigrants is fear of social rejection, threatening racial environments, improper usage of language, unfamiliarity with customs as well as fear of cultural others. Some have suggested that because the gorges within the Muslim community are cultural and deeply dependent upon the location of language and the comfort customs provide for first generation Muslims, time will heal the phenomenon and minimize the abyss. Cursory analysis might support the proposition that barriers of this nature are natural, and in time will be treated, organically reduced or eventually alleviated. However these fragile and often ineffective justifications have not consoled those dismayed by the lack of progress in human relations inside the Muslim community, relegating some groups to others. For this and succeeding Muslim generations to succumb to Western cultural biases and social beliefs that have strained and stalled racial relations in America since the mid nineteen sixties, is to compromise the basic Islamic epistemological understanding of communal equality, and the divine purpose for mankind. Muslims adhering to new political and racial identities of the dominant American class, and being financially rewarded for such loyalty are enabled to appreciate the inorganic energy of assimilation unconsciously becoming racially compliant.The foundational structures of ideal Islamic societies, envisioned by the Prophet Mohammad are distinguished from the nefarious and hypocritical racial segregation maintained in America. It would be of the utmost imprudence that Muslims reflect the docility demonstrated by Americans accepting or by indifference condoning the malignancy of segregation, and the fatality of racism tied to the crisis in America.Under the compulsion of American identity politics, cultural and racial devotions acquire different modes, textures and as they unfold the contours left are variegated. American identity politics will demand from second and third generation offspring of European and Middle Eastern ancestry, choices as to which side of the divide their political and cultural loyalties are engaged; and to emphatically replicate standard racial associations and sensibilities reflecting the collective image of the white majority. Those lines in the sand will be drawn. The meanings of postmodern Islamic identities verses the demands of contemporary Western cultural and political assimilative identities will clash, and as we witness Islam will loose to the dexterity of western psychological concerns. Muslims borrow and rely heavily on an enormous volume of western intellectual capital. The prowess of American identity politics of the past forty years has forced some ambitious immigrants to re-prioritize their thinking as to whether the cultural models of America have enticed or will compel personal achievement and the accumulation of wealth at the expense of Islamic identity. The prevalence of western norms, modes of behavior, and moral conduct have been surging immigrant Muslims towards secularization and American democracy, progressive politics, and the western theories of science as knowledge. Because these materialistic propensities are draining into the Islamic world, the question of accepting and complying with the Western hypothesis of race undoubtedly surfaces.The power of American cultural identities was initially maintained by negating and systematically punishing those not of the dominant racial or economic class. By way of material reward it strongly encouraged newcomers to abandon any identity that poses a threat to the majority ruling elite. As Muslims are asked to demonstrate their disapproval of terrorism, the servitude of women, the primitiveness of Islamic cultures, the response from Muslims will determine in what mode and manner future political power bases are formed. What should maintain our vigilance is that the power of American cultural identity politics is the power of domination. In an essay, “Giving Whiteness a Black Eye”, Michel Eric Dyson gives domination historical context, “From the very beginning of our nation’s existence, the discursive defense and political logic of American democracy has spawned white dominance as the foundational myth of American society—a myth whose ideological strength was made all the more powerful because it was rendered invisible. After all its defenders did not have to be conscious of how white dominance and later white supremacy shaped their world views, since there was little to challenge their beliefs. Their beliefs defined the intellectual and cultural status quo. In that sense the white race–, its cultural habits, political practices, religious beliefs, and intellectual affinities—was socially constructed as the foundation of American democracy”. 

The idea of a united, classless and race-less Muslim community initially attracted most African Americans to accept Islam. Cultural and racial inclusiveness, communal harmony and freedom are the Islamic models of civilization to which the African American was originally attracted and enamored.  Nevertheless as the cultural and political reality surfaced and the cards appeared stacked against the African American, ironically the social picture of the mosque strengthened the resolve of most African American Muslims; sober was the state most people of color realized after being exposed to derogatory racial comments and cultural condescension from fellow Muslims.

These emerging forces foster an undertaking diametrically opposed to racial and cultural inclusion in Islam, which in the West has functioned as a weapon of ideology for institutional racism and racial alienation.

With the unprecedented and immeasurable growth in the national immigrant community, racial and cultural predicaments are growing exponentially. To critique the Muslim cultural and racial paradigm might reveal a reflection of America’s racial melancholy.

The new Islamic model of social inclusion initiated through diverse leadership, as well as the history of racial isolation and a clearly defined American caste system, deals with an intellectual framework of discussion focused on acquiring initially a commitment to a solution, secondarily reorienting and reinvigorating the leadership ranks, and on a tertiary level exploring new social paradigms and converting them to new interfaith alliances. Within the Muslim community the Islamization undertaking, pivotal to restoring and refurbishing Islamic values, begins with the violent de-colonization and exorcism of Western biases that mask the potential behind Islamic socialization and its rationalization for human integration. The appeal is to bring two worlds to rediscover the thresholds of human confluence, and embrace the issues emanating from the current crisis of the mosque. This exorcism has the hope of sending a message to the Muslim constituency and to the American people that the Islamic position on racial and cultural inclusion is proactive and uncompromising. The violent de-colonization of the Western bias is stated to dramatize the urgency and importance of restoring human empathy, and like a thief in the night coming to instill the dignity of people towards each other. It is a methodology to appropriate and acclimate the Muslim attitude currently discouraging many Muslims from attending the mosque. Religious history claims the success, reclamation and reconstruction of exhausted religious groups redefining and recreating themselves from within. Some that migrated from Eastern Europe during and after world war two recreated themselves in New York City, and their success visibly for the world to see .

The ancient Islamic empires will never be recreated; nonetheless their valued memories dramatically imposed upon the spiritual consciousnesses direct the righteous to contribute to the moral resuscitation of the American people. The answers are to be found in investing in the new face of America, by challenging the existing hierarchal elites culturally clashing with the indigenous. The existence of a Muslim society within North America is dependent upon the ability of future Muslim generations to adopt identities that express affinity for others, and for the freedoms of American life without dissipating their alacrity for Islam, or diminishing its current potential value in the new millennium. In witnessing the beginning of a spiraling down fall for the Islamic community, the post-modern progressive Muslim peering into the future of Islamic and interfaith relations, confronts not only the issue of race and cultural incompatibility but also a paternalistic, deterministic, and pessimistic audience. The campaign to attract back to the new mosque the old participants that fought for its presence and survival in America twenty to thirty years ago is the challenge of the next twenty to thirty years.

 The carefully plotted and precipitous fall of the Ottoman Empire relied upon the decline of Islamic values and principals; they were systematically arrested by secular authorities, tried, convicted, and replaced by western mores. Islamic values traditionally cherished by Muslims were threatened and eventually discarded by the progress of the West. To coalesce with the wave of secularism considered progress, this empire subordinated values considered by the West to be out-dated, as modernity had destroyed their useful application. The lessons from the Ottoman Empire are immense, with broad appeal to any developing Islamic community within Western society. It is apparent that a lethargic and haughty intellectual elite that compromised tradition, reasoning and dignity contributed to the plummeting of the Ottoman Empire, and currently distracts Muslims from demanding matters.In an informative and courageous analysis of the current Muslim predicament, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi in Islamic Awakening summarizes what he considers to be a “preoccupation with side issues”.  “Intellectual shallowness and lack of religious insight also manifest themselves in an intense interest in marginal issues at the expense of central ones— those which could affect the existence, identity, and destiny of the whole ummah. There is excessive and unnecessary talk about growing a beard, wearing robes below the ankle, moving the finger while reciting tashahhud in prayer, acquisition of photographs and so on. Unfortunately such time wasting debates persist and occupy our thinking at a time when we are being confronted by the unrelenting hostility and infiltration of secularism…” The focus and work for the Muslim intellectual of this era is broad. His work is to make sense, and further explain to a diverse immigrant community the cavernous complexities of the social and racial historicity segregating and thus crippling this nation. He must disseminate an awareness of the current social calamity and remain empowered to manufacture new clinical perspectives unique to four areas. The first subject is to highlight the history, causes and contemporary ramifications of racism in the West generally, and feature with concrete specificity the affects of systematic discrimination as it pertains to three very powerful systems: how wealth is distributed, access to education, and employment. The second area is the discussion around the lingering consequences of racial stereotyping, social dehumanization and how they form the imperceptible prowess behind the shaping of the dominant culture. The next area of crucial importance is to demonstrate the cooperation and intent of the Muslim community to provide new perspectives to the discussion about the cultural and social positioning of the advantaged in relation to the disenfranchised and disembodied in America. The final theme must articulate the methodology needed to demystify, then purge both dominate and subordinate groups of the stigmas causing ineffective dialogue about the locus of culture and race in America and its faith communities.